


Black Velocities and Shining Movements

by dimeliora



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Murder, Violence, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 02:09:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19454164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimeliora/pseuds/dimeliora
Summary: Set in Season 2, Sam has sustained a terrible injury trying to protect his brother. He finds himself in a tiny, idyllic village being cared for by Dean. Unsure if his paranoia is wholly justified or the result of brain damage, Sam finds himself fighting not only to recover but to understand what is unfolding around him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beautiful art by amber dreams, can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19438231  
> https://amberdreams.livejournal.com/617039.html

“And you said, it was like fire around the brim  
Burning solid, burning thin the burning rim  
Like stars burning holes right through the dark  
Flicking fire like saltwater into my eyes  
You were one inch from the edge of this bed  
I dragged you back a sleepyhead, sleepyhead

They couldn't think of something to say the day you burst  
With all their lions, with all their might and all their thirst  
They crowd your bedroom like some thoughts wearing thin  
Against the walls, against your rules, against your skin  
My beard grew down to the floor and out through the doors  
Of your eyes, begonia skies like a sleepyhead, sleepyhead”

Passion Pit, “Sleepyhead”

There is no shortage of memories that Dean wishes he could forget and instead remembers in shining, perfect Technicolor with full surround sound. Sam thinks that part of his brain is reserved for media and monsters, and why wouldn’t he? Dean doesn’t really recount a lot of things from their childhood because the good moments they shared are generally only important to him.

Listed in the top five is the first time Sam ever got seriously hurt. It is memorable for two reasons. Dean recalls that it’s the first time that he ever tasted real failure. Sam was three and Dean was responsible for getting him out of the car seat in the back of the Impala. It was a ridiculous responsibility, Dean only realized years later, because he himself was still in a car seat and both of them should have had adult supervision to get out.

But logic can only soothe so much of a wound and on a deeper level of course it was Dean’s fault because Sam, in all respects, was Dean’s responsibility. So, when little Sammy was trying to get out of his car seat and tangled his foot on the seatbelt before toppling and making a dive for the asphalt Dean knew that he should have done something better. He should have caught Sam, or picked Sam up, or _something_ that would have made the whole situation moot.

He should have stopped it.

Instead he stood silent and shocked as Sam’s face kissed the pavement and blood bloomed out of multiple abrasions along that smooth baby cheek and forehead. He watched as Sam’s head lifted up and his brother’s mouth moved in silent confusion, face working its way through a variety of emotions before it crumpled into pain and betrayal at the world’s sudden cruelty.

And the second reason Dean remembers it so well. His future egghead brother had very quietly and clearly said “Ouchie” before he broke into horrendous sobs.

The sound of it, quiet and small in the parking lot that had suddenly gone deathly silent as the entire world changed for both of them, is something that haunts Dean. Follows him into the dark at night when he’s going to sleep.

Dean remembers thinking it when Sam was possibly infected in River Grove and insisted Dean leave him behind. He remembers hearing it echo in the antiques shop when Sam put himself on the chopping block to summon Mary’s ghost. Ouchie. Plain and simple, quiet, an accusation and a statement of fact.

Once again he had failed to keep the world from hurting Sam in the most basic and tragic of ways.

Sometimes, when Dean is very _very_ drunk he thinks about turning to Sam and saying, in a way that would totally impress Sam with its succinctness (thank you very much word of the day calendar on that dead banker’s desk) that watching Sam say ouchie was the foundation of all of Dean’s deep seated Sam based issues.

And when he did Sam would ponder that, turn it over and over in the big head of his, and then in spite of Dean’s remarkable ability to fully sum up an issue in one sentence make it into a _conversation_ about their feelings and thoughts. Because that was Sam, and feeding that would only bring Dean pain and anguish. So instead he kept his little piece of introspective brilliance to himself because it didn’t pay to have Sam looking into Dean deeper than he usually did.

Dean had enough trouble with that as it was.

Ultimately though it made it very easy to ignore when Sam bitched about Dean being over protective, because in Dean’s head he could very smartly say, “But what about ouchie Sam? What about that?” and the Sam in this theoretical situation would open and close his mouth in shock before giving in and taking the damn bed further away from the door without complaining. He would let Dean go in through the door first. He wouldn’t make such a big deal out of things and he wouldn’t ever try to take the wound for Dean again.

But that would never be the real world Sam, and Dean had accepted that fact. Even if it made him crazy.

It worked and then it didn’t, but Dean was always really good about rolling with the punches. He was able to deal with the surprises because of it. He was able to _adapt_ when things got really bad. Mom died? Dean adapted. Dad died for him? Dean adapted.

Sam left? Dean…adapted. As best he could. Swallowed it all down and adapted to a world without his little brother. And if someone asked Dean the question he feared most then he would have simply walked away from the answer he knew deep down in his heart.

That he stopped caring about himself. That he stopped caring about anything except running through the days. That the reason he ran through sexual partners, through dangerous hunts, through every last piece of life is that the only piece that mattered didn’t want to see him anymore. Had left him willingly.

Any way you looked at it Dean would always keep his head just above water. He would always tread. He was a survivor. A car crash didn’t kill him, a faulty heart didn’t kill him, and learning others died to make that happen didn’t kill him. He’d denied a Reaper their prize, and he was still here kicking ass and taking names.

And minus one or two serious, hard-core fuckups Dean had always made sure Sam was treading next to him.

It’s all of this that goes through Dean’s head when Sam jumps in front of him and the twin rebar poles go through Sam’s chest and leg instead of Dean’s. His brother is thrown back with the force of the impalement, slamming into Dean and knocking him back onto the ground. The wind is taken out of him, and Dean’s head bounces off of the concrete flashing bright stars behind his eyelids and sending his breath flying out to parts unknown.

And then Dean is in motion, moving Sam off of him as carefully as he possibly can and rolling across the ground to the edge of the grave before dropping the Zippo into it and watching the bones light up. If he had managed that seconds earlier the-

Dean rolls back over, the whole world moving in slow motion, and locks eyes with Sam. Sam who has a steel bar sticking out of his chest, another in his leg, and who looks for all the world like a little boy that just skinned his face.

“Ouchie.”

And Dean, much to his eternal shame, hears his own voice screaming _I told you so_ in his head as panic sets in and he begins to rush.

\----

Sam is calm. That’s what Dean can’t believe. Sam is calm. Sam is laying there, breath shallow, and he is calm. The paramedics are moving around like there’s an emergency, but Sam is calm. It’s really fucking him up. Trying to balance those two incredibly disparate reactions. Trying to believe that the paramedics are right because they’re the professionals. Sam. Sam is not a medical professional. Sam is a severely injured man. A maybe dy-

Nope. Nope. Not going there. Not thinking that.

Dean focuses on believing in the paramedics, because just this once Sam is not the smarter voice. He is not the one who knows all.

_Just this once._

“It’s fine, Dean. I’m fine. I’m still talking.”

“Sir, sir we need to take your brother to the nearest hospital. Do you want to follow the ambulance?”

“Dean. I’m fine. Go get the car. I’m fine.”

“Sir? Sir you need to let him go. We need to go now. Do you want to ride with us or follow behind?”

“Dean.” Sam’s lips are turning grey, but his eyes are feverish bright and focused on Dean. “Dean I’m fine.”

And then they’re rolling him away. Dean isn’t even sure if he answered. Doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. Just that the lights rotating on the top of the ambulance are replacing all the colors of the graveyard. That all he loves is being loaded up into an ambulance and taken away from him.

Dean goes to Baby. Drops into the driver’s seat and starts her up without getting even the smallest of thrills from the familiar rumble. Puts her into drive and follows mechanically behind the ambulance as it speeds away from what might be the site of his brother’s untimely demise.

Although that’s not true.

Sam will die in the ambulance mid-route. Or in the hospital. He’s already left the graveyard. It can’t be the place he-

Dean puts the gas pedal down further and stops thinking. Nothing good can come of it.

\----

Sam knows that this is serious. And it hurts. _A lot_. It hurts more than he cares to admit. But Sam is also aware that Dean could very well go batshit insane and do something awful in only seconds so it’s important to keep his brother grounded and hopeful.

And Winchesters are not known for their hope. Stubborn, pigheaded, personal assuredness yes, but not hope. Even when they thought Sam was infected with the Croatoan virus and Dean was refusing to leave it was obvious he never believed that Sam was gonna be ok.

The paramedics are not helping by giving Dean choices so Sam tells them to leave his brother behind. Driving will focus Dean. Sam can take comfort in the fact that Dean will drive the Impala like a precious object. That he’ll show it the care Sam wants Dean to show himself.

He can drift after Dean is gone. While the ambulance speeds toward the hospital Sam can let go and simply float along. He’s pretty sure that they’re giving him drugs, because the pain is less, and Sam is glad for that. Glad to be rid of the sharp agony in his lung and the screaming pain in his thigh.

Time hops and skips. They get to the hospital and Sam can hear Dean again. It’s odd. Sounds like crying and growling all at once. Sam can’t stay with it though because then the world is all bright light and doctors swimming in and out of view in what must be an operating theater.

And then Sam is sitting in the hallway next to Dean. His brother is bent over, blood on his hands, his face, dried and crunchy in his hair.

“Hey, Dean. Remember how stupid I thought that jizz in the hair joke was? Well now you’ve got blood doing just that. And it looks just as stupid. _You_ look _stupid_.”

Dean doesn’t respond, but Sam doesn’t expect him to.

“Just to be clear, I know you’re going to give me Hell for this. All that nonsense about letting you take the bullet because you’re older and blah blah blah. I know you’re going to do that, but I was right. I was right to step up. You know how I know? Because if I was wrong you’d argue right now.”

Dean rubs his hair, ignoring the pull of the dried blood against his hands and the way it crumbles and falls to the ground between his knees. The blood on his face is wet though. It takes Sam a moment to realize that’s because tears are rehydrating it.

Sam only partially regrets cheating a moment ago.

He reaches out and pets the line of Dean’s back, knowing that Dean can’t feel it but needing the contact anyway.

“You know the funny thing is I had this feeling. When we took the case you know? I had this feeling something big was coming. Not necessarily this. I don’t think it was this. But I had a feeling. It wasn’t like the dreams either. I felt like this was something we were meant to do you know? Like when you get to the ending of a really good movie and you see how all the plot points are coming together to reach this inevitable destination. I felt like this was that moment. When things were all coming together. And I don’t know what I thought the destination was, but I guess this one is just as inevitable as any other right? Can that happen? Lots of things being inevitable?”

There’s a word there that Sam knows, something that was a trivia point he once picked up, but he doesn’t want to think of it. The darker version of what he’s telling Dean.

Dean lets out a little noise and covers his face, head sinking down to almost touch his knees. Sam didn’t know his brother was that flexible.

“Sam Winchester?”

He looks up to see a young man, no older than fifteen or sixteen, standing in the hallway a door down and looking at him. Dean told him how the Reaper was the only one that could see him. From the way the young man is focused on him, Sam puts together the pieces. 

“If I tell you no will you be surprised?”

The boy, who is probably much older than him, tilts his head and smiles.

“No. I won’t. But I’m not here for you. I’m just passing through.” He sits across from Sam on the floor, eyes focused on Dean. “I’d take you if you wanted me to though. The alternative is much worse.”

Sam’s never heard of this before. He thought that Reapers could only take whoever they were meant to. A part of him, the part that always wants answers and a full picture, tries to open his mouth. But Sam’s not sure that he has the time. That getting looped into a conversation with a Reaper won’t end in him abandoning his brother again.

“What’s the alternative? Hanging around here forever? That doesn’t seem so bad.”

The Reaper is still looking at Dean, and Sam thinks that he will make the argument Sam most expects. About how it will kill Dean to sit here next to his body and watch him waste away. That Dean will die slow and sure with him as his body rots in a bed. He thinks that the Reaper will appeal to his logical side by telling him that life is for the living, and that the kind thing to do is to release Dean from purgatory and let his brother move on with his life.

To which Sam will respond that the Reaper doesn’t know the Winchesters very well, because Dean will never go on with his life. It’s not possible for them. No matter what Sam does Dean will live or die with him.

It’s the one sure thing in Sam’s whole world.

“Living.”

Sam looks up at that. Surprise is an understatement.

“Do I look suicidal to you?”

The Reaper leans in a bit, getting just a touch closer to Sam, but keeping his eyes on Dean.

“The quality of life is very important Sam. Also important? The direction. What awaits you beyond this hospital, should you choose to go on, is not something I would wish on even a Winchester. And you will drag your brother down with you.”

It’s the last sentence that gives Sam pause. Drag his brother down with him? To be honest, and Sam can be honest with himself about these things, that is always going to be true. After all Sam has dragged Dean down with him since the day Dean came to Stanford. Maybe longer than that if Sam really stops to think about examples. Certainly he hadn’t helped Dean by taking him to bed and then leaving him behind. So what, exactly, is the Reaper alluding to that could be so much worse?

“If I die here Dean will either find a way to bring me back or join me. Isn’t that right?”

The Reaper pauses, his eyes never moving from Dean’s cupped and bloody hands.

“I don’t know.”

He’s lying. About what Sam doesn’t know, but he _is_ lying. It’s a certainty.

“Then you aren’t in a position of authority to talk me into doing anything. And I’d like you to leave so I can spend time with my brother.”

Sam is a little surprised when the Reaper stands up and brushes off his pants. But hey, it’s been a surprising day.

“Good luck, Captain Black.”

He waits for the Reaper to be fully gone before he turns back to Dean.

“Reapers are _really_ fucking weird. Have we ever talked about that? How weird was the one you met?”

Sam feels a tug in his chest and ignores it. Ignores the heat that rushes after it and the sudden dizziness that comes along with it.

“And what kind of threat is that anyway? ‘Life.’ Doesn’t he know what kind of life we live?”

“Sam. Please.”

Dean sounds hoarse, broken, and Sam rests a hand on Dean’s back and slumps deeper into the chair beside him.

“We’re always going to drag each other down. It’s almost a rule at this point.”

Dean takes a shaky breath and lifts his head. Sam follows his gaze to see a doctor coming out of the door of the waiting area. The man is covered in blood, and he looks up and down the hall before his gaze locks onto Dean.

His brother must have heard his name. Sam wasn’t listening for it.

“Dean. Whatever he says Dean I’m fine. I’m not leaving. You got me? I’m fine.”

Sam watches as Dean’s breath gets short and tight. As his brother squares his shoulders and prepares for the worst.

“Mr. Winchester?”

Dean nods, eyes on the doctor, and Sam wonders how Dean is going to pull off paying for all of this if he gave them their real names.

“It was touch and go for a moment there, but your brother is going to live.”

Sam watches hope blossom in his brother’s face.

“He’s not awake yet, but we need to talk about his recovery.”

Sam would like to hear this. He knows that whatever Dean tells him later will be an edited version. But he’s being pulled away now. The hallway is moving rapidly underneath him as he rushes back to his body.

\----

_Good luck, Captain Black._

Sam wakes up to pain. The last thing he clearly remembers is the ambulance. The sound of the sirens screaming and the paramedics discussing his chances and his issues. Which one of them was Captain Black?

He can’t remember. His mouth is dry and every breath is shallow and difficult. There’s an oxygen mask strapped to his face and Sam can feel it pull and relax every time he struggles to draw in a breath. There’s something heavy on his hand, weighing down his whole right arm, and Sam turns his head slow and careful only to see the top of Dean’s head.

There’s dried blood in Dean’s hair. Sam flexes his fingers under Dean’s face and waits for his brother to wake up. Dean doesn’t disappoint. He jerks the second Sam’s fingers move and then sits up and looks at him with wide and shocked eyes. Sam can’t lift his hand enough to point at Dean’s hair, and he can’t make sounds come out of his mouth to tell Dean that the blood is there. He tries to point with his eyes, but Dean isn’t getting it.

“Sam? Sam can you hear me?”

Sam can’t say what he’s thinking, but Dean seems to hear it anyway.

“Right. Nothing wrong with your ears. Ok, how do you feel?”

_Like shit_. Dean nods again like Sam has spoken, and Sam feels the brief pressure of Dean’s fingers on his hand and then it’s gone and Sam is left with just the feeling of the bed and the pain.

“Don’t move around ok? They got you so full of tubes you look like a water park.”

Sam wants water. He wants to be sitting up in some shitty diner with Dean drinking water and eating a salad and not thinking of tiny families with fish belly white legs sliding in and out of his chest.

They _have_ to have him on morphine.

Dean leans over him, presses the button, and Sam feels the slightest whoosh before things start to get unstable again. Dean is still leaning in, close, and Sam licks his lips and tries one more time to make sound but he fails.

His brother handles it for him again.

“Rest, Sammy. Sleep. Just rest and sleep and when you wake up it’ll be better. They think they can take you off the respirator in another day or so, and then you’ll be able to bitch at me as much as you want.”

Sam is a little surprised that Dean doesn’t take this opportunity to tell him how wrong he was to just jump in front of the oncoming rebar. It’s the one time Dean will be able to do it without Sam arguing back.

“Wouldn’t be worth it to tell you how wrong you were right now. You won’t remember. I’ll tell you later when you can remember it.”

He wants water. His mouth is so dry. He can’t figure out how Dean can read his mind about everything else but can’t figure out that Sam is practically dying of dehydration. He tries again to tell Dean, but the morphine is taking him away.

_Good luck, Captain Black_.

Sam tries to look around, but his lids slide closed and everything goes dark.

\---

“Mr. Harmon?”

Sam doesn’t bother to glance down at his wrist to see if it’s his fake name. He does wonder how long the insurance will hold out.

“Yes?”

His voice is raspy. They removed the respirator mask this morning, and Sam has been sucking on ice chips and working himself up to full sentences since. Dean is passed out in the chair beside Sam with his chin on his chest. Sam debates having the doctor wake him up so that Dean can finish his sentences, and then changes his mind.

“How are you feeling?”

The answer is somewhere between chewed up dog shit and a cored apple. Sam licks his lips and tries to force a smile. From the look on the doctor’s face the result must be ghastly.

“Better.”

“Mr. Harmon, your injuries were fairly extensive. We’re a smaller hospital, we don’t deal with this sort of trauma very often. Ever in fact. We were able to remove the drainage tubes to your lung and your blood oxygen level has gone back up. We need to do some tests to rule out any potential damage to your brain, and you need to be monitored for a while. The chances of infection considering what the penetrating bodies were are very high. We don’t expect you to be even close to better yet. Can you give me a number for your pain level?”

Six to nine hundred on a scale of ten.

“Eight.”

The doctor steps up then, checking the port in Sam’s arm, the bandages where the tubes used to be, and then the bandages on Sam’s thigh.

“That was an excellent lie. Now tell the truth.”

Sam almost likes this guy.

“Off chart.”

His mouth is dry again, but he can’t get to the ice chips on his own and he has to ask questions now or Dean will wake up and control the flow of the conversation.

“Well the bad news is that your morphine is set as high as I’m comfortable setting it considering we don’t have medical records for you. At least, not ones that actually belong to you.”

Sam feels his fingers go numb, and his dry lips move nervously over words he can’t create. He can hear the monitor gearing up, the beeping announcing his racing heart to the room and causing Dean to stir in his sleep.

“Sir. Mr. Harmon. Please. Calm down.”

Sam focuses on the doctor, makes himself take a painful breath and slow his pulse.

“Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sure that the two of you have a perfectly viable reason for lying about your identities. Most likely because you don’t have insurance and this is the sort of injury you need insurance for. But we’re a really small hospital. For the most part we only treat pregnancies and snakebites. So, if we maybe suspect that there’s something wrong with the insurance we can make our own call on what action we want to take because there’s not many people to be accountable for. I’m a doctor. My priority is your wellness. If your brother tries to unhook you in the middle of the night and sneak out then my patient dies and what good does that do anyone?”

The logic of it is so human and decent that Sam instantly distrusts it. He and Dean don’t get the kind of luck that results in not running from the police. The doctor settles Sam’s bandages back down and starts writing on his chart.

“I can see on your face you don’t believe me. Well, our local police force consists of Sheriff Windsor and Deputy Bobbsey. As in the mystery solving twins. I think the worst thing either of them has ever handled is a rash of mysterious butt prints on car windows. So, if the two of them show up with every piece of crime fighting technology they’ve ever gotten through grants you’ll know I’m a liar. In the meantime I’m going to schedule a CT scan because, like I mentioned, we are fairly small and don’t have an MRI.”

Sam twitches his fingers again and then gives up on being able to make a forceful gesture. The doctor stops though, and he looks at Sam’s hand for a moment before meeting Sam’s gaze.

“How long? Recovery?”

The doctor reaches down and pats Sam’s hand, carefully and softly, and Sam thinks that maybe the guy is a little more inherently decent than Sam is prepared to believe.

“A month and a half? Maybe two. It depends on how fast the muscles in your thigh start to heal and whether or not there’s post-operative infection. Your lung is going to recover much faster than that I think because we took a lot of precautions with it. Ultimately though it’s all going to depend on you. There’s going to be a lot of therapy involved in your recovery, and you’re going to have to be willing to put in the work. It’s going to hurt, I won’t lie to you, but I hope that when we reach the end of it you’re going to walk out of here just fine. I would suggest more physical therapy once you leave here, but I think that you’re going to handle it fine. You look tough.”

Sam swallows, looks to Dean, and then looks back to the doctor.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Is your first name really Sam?”

Sam could slap Dean and hug him all at once. His brother picked an alias with his first name so Sam wouldn’t have to struggle to keep up with the lie. Not that it seems to matter now of course.

“Yes.”

“Alright, Sam. Rest. I’ll schedule the test. Also, when he wakes up get some more ice chips from him. Your mouth is probably pretty dry.”

Sam waits for the doctor to be gone before he lets himself sink further into the bed and wallow in despair.

Two months. A month and a half. Either one is too long for Dean. Sam knows from experience how long the two of them are allowed to wait on a recovery. Dean will start to get the itch, and soon, and when he does he’s going to do the dumbest thing he possibly can. Because he’s a Winchester and it’s their M.O.

He can’t hope that the doctor hasn’t already told Dean this. He knows for a fact his brother has multiple reasons to wonder how long Sam will be here and what his chances at a full recovery are.

In the end, as much as it worries Dean to do so, he will leave Sam behind so that he can branch out on his own to hunt. Because he can’t sit still while people suffer. Because he can’t settle down in one place.

And because he can’t put Sam in danger.

Sam thinks back to all the times when he was too young to go off on the hunt. How interminable and long the wait was to know if Dean would return, if this would be the last time that he felt his brother tousle his hair and say something stupid instead of saying goodbye.

This is what he’s being condemned too. This is what a recovery time like this means. Wondering and waiting in a hospital until finally Dean returns or he doesn’t.

Sam doesn’t even know what fucking city they’re in.

_Zugsomething. That’s it. Zugsomething._

Sam passes out on that thought.


	2. Chapter 2

“It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.”   
― **Joe Hill,**[ **Horns**](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6781405)

Dean leaves Sam long enough to go to the bathroom. That’s it. A simple piss and he’s going to be back, but sure enough it’s just the length of time his little brother needs to do something stupid. Dean comes back in to find Sam eyeballing his port and flexing his fingers.

He crosses the room in what feels like two steps and grabs Sam’s twitching hand. To be fair to his brother, which a tiny part of Dean can be, Sam isn’t really _able_ to unhook himself at this point in his recovery.

To be unfair, a bigger part of Dean screams, Sam has put Dean through enough in the last few days and Dean doesn’t need to worry that Sam is going to unhook himself and fuck himself up worse falling out of the hospital bed.

“Sammy. You’re awake.”

Sam’s eyes are glazed with morphine, his lips dry and cracked, and Dean releases his brother’s hand to pluck up the cup and spoon ice chips into his brother’s mouth. And then, because Sam is a huge girl that has rubbed off on Dean, he slips chapstick out of his back pocket and carefully applies it to Sam’s mouth.

His brother’s shocked face is enough payment that Dean doesn’t even need a thank you.

“You’re not getting out of this bed until there’s no other choice. When the heat’s around the corner, Sam. That’s when we move you.”

He can see that his brother wants to say something, but all that emerges from Sam’s mouth is a croak. Dean takes over the conversation because one of them has to explain logic to the other and this duty always seems to be Dean’s anyway.

“You busted yourself up pretty bad Sammy. See, when you’re not the target you stand back and then it’s your job to take care of my lazy ass while I recover. But, instead, you got into that head of yours to jump in front of the bars and get hurt way worse than I would have. So now you gotta take your medicine.”

Sam groans and Dean feels the ghost of a grin cross his mouth. The first time in days.

“You love puns.” He feeds Sam more ice chips and looks around the room. “This is a pretty tiny fucking hospital. You ever notice that when they’re smaller they just seem to scale all the shit down? You would think they’d take some of it out, but nope. It’s like every hospital has rules about how much shit they gotta pack in a room. I think it’s how they justify how much they charge your HMO. Dry erase board with staff names? There’s an extra three thousand.”

Sam swallows and then opens his mouth and Dean spoons more ice chips in. He thinks, again, about Sam as a little boy. About playing airplane to feed Sam baby food. He should have laid off the fucking vegetable flavored ones. It would have saved him a lot of pain and suffering later in life.

“How do they justify all the money? I know what you’re thinking. We’re not paying for it so who cares? But you know what? Somebody shoulda put their foot down years ago. Somebody who mattered and coulda gotten it changed. Any way you look at it though it’s highway robbery. Makes what we’re doing a misdemeanor. At best. And the food. What about the food?”

Sam sucks on the ice chips and looks past Dean for a moment before focusing back on his brother. Dean can see from the sharpness in Sam’s eyes that his brother is too _there_. Sam needs to be doped up for this. Dean is aware that Sam will complain about this later, but for now Dean knows better. He pushes the morphine button and then sweeps Sam’s hair out of his eyes.

“Not that you’ve tasted the food here yet really, but you will eventually and you’ll complain about it non-stop. So, prepare for that. We both know how much you like to bitch.”

His brother gives him a look, not quite a bitchface but something close enough that Dean thinks maybe his brother is feeling a little bit more himself despite the opiate that Dean has released into his veins.

That’s good and bad.

“They got a lot of good things to say about your recovery Sammy. Doctor thinks it’s going to be just fine. So, there’s that. Doesn’t mean you should do it again, but it does mean that you need to follow the plan and get better ASAP. Which I know you’ll do, you overachiever.”

Sam swallows again and then moves his mouth. Dean leans down, ignoring the hospital breath Sam has to try to hear as clearly as possible whatever it is that Sam thinks is so important, he has to suffer to say it.

“Faster.”

“No. Not faster Sam.” Dean doesn’t sit up because he knows that Sam will have a response to that and they need to have this argument as best they can and get it out of the way now.

“Faster.”

“No. No, because they aren’t joking around about how bad this was Sam. They’re not wrong. They’re the experts and you’re just some dumbass that got impaled. So, when they say you’re down for a while you’re down for a while. You got me?”

And Dean can tell from the way Sam’s breath changes as it puffs against his cheek, from the way that Sam’s body goes a little bit more slack underneath him, that the morphine has really hit.

“ _Zugzwang_. That.”

Dean is pretty sure that this isn’t his brother talking nonsense. That it means something, but Dean is damned if he knows what.

“Huh? Sammy what the hell does that mean?”

“Captain Black.”

And then Sam is asleep again, and Dean sits back and gently combs Sam’s hair back with his fingers. Makes it smooth and flat against his brother’s skull as he watches Sam’s chest move up and down.

It’s comforting to watch. It’s good to hear. Sam’s lungs working, the injured one and the healthy one. Sam’s heart pumping blood that is staying in his body without any deviation from the plan.

Dean doesn’t want to stop and think about where this could go. About what will happen when he has to pack Sam up and run. About what’s left for Sam to do.

Sam lived, and everything else is going to go just fine in obedience to the strength of Sam’s will.

Dean looks up when the door opens and closes. It’s the doctor, Dean can’t remember his name, who looks like he’s nervous. Dean tries his hardest to not freak out. This is too fast, too soon, and Dean can’t handle it.

“Sir? Mr. Winchester?”

He’s not sure why he gave his real name. When it caused raised eyebrows Dean had tried to play it off, spun some bullshit story about a stepfather and an adoption, and at the time it had seemed to go over.

Dean is starting to question that victory.

“Yes?”

The doctor takes a seat across the room, near the door, and opens the chart he’s holding.

“I have some questions about your brother’s medical history. Namely how accurate it is.”

He can’t figure out if this is a good sign or a bad sign. If the doctor is planning on kicking them out why would he bother to get more info on Sammy?

“It’s accurate.”

“Alright. It’s just that his name isn’t-“

“His medical history is accurate.”

The doctor sighs before closing his chart and rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looks exhausted.

“Mr. Winchester, I understand that you’re very stressed right now, and that you’re looking at your injured brother, but I would like you to understand that I am not here to make things worse for either of you. I’m a doctor, and my patient’s care comes first. No one here is going to turn you in to the police or turn your brother out into the cold. If you’re really worried about it then what I would suggest is that we find you something to do here in town that will allow you to pay his medical bills.”

Dean feels a hysterical laugh bubbling up and shoves it down.

“What could I possibly do around here that would pay this kind of medical bill?”

The doctor smiles at that, hands squeezing down on the chart briefly and making it creak before he gets a hold of himself.

“A fair question. Definitely a fair question. What we’re gonna do is this. We’ll keep on billing Mr. Harmon’s insurance. That way you’re only looking at the deductible, and that isn’t too bad. We’re a small hospital and we don’t have a lot of patients or employees. I don’t see a problem with you staying here with your brother if you’re ok with that chair. Does that sound good?”

It sounds…suspicious as hell. It sounds like the kind of thing that happens to people in TV shows and movies. The audience _awws_ and the hero settles in, but that’s not what happens in reality. In reality Dean goes to jail and Sam ends up out on the street with two giant holes still in him.

“What’s the job?”

Dean can stay vigilant. Dean can watch out. And if the whole thing was real for a time? Well then Dean will be able to buy some time until Sam is mobile again.

“Funny you should ask that. Do you know anything about books?”

\----

Dean waits for Sam to wake up again. His brother’s eyes are a little glassy, but he locks onto Dean quickly and stays locked on.

“Sammy. You will not believe what just happened.”

His brother lifts one eyebrow and twitches his hand. Dean picks up the ice chip cup, spoons two into Sam’s mouth.

“The doctor figured us out. Well. Partially. And you are looking at the local bookstore’s newest stock boy and cashier.”

Sam sucks in a breath and chokes on his ice chips. The coughing makes his brother’s face go pure white like the medical gown so close to it, and Dean panics. He hits the call button and tries to calm Sam at the same time, murmuring nonsense as he lifts his brother’s arms carefully and then rubs Sam’s chest. He can feel the thickness of the bandages underneath and they only serve to fuel the panic he’s trying so hard to hide.

By the time the nurse arrives Sam is already getting it under control, but his face is still incredibly pale and Dean watches as the nurse hits Sam’s morphine button for him and settles his arms back down at his sides. She gives Dean a look, questioning, and Dean nods and waves her off. Once she’s gone he settles in next to Sam again and takes his brother’s hand.

“Guess I shouldn’t try to make you spray milk from your nose either.”

The look Sam gives him is not kind, but Dean is glad to see it. It’s the liveliest Sam has looked in some time.

“So yeah. I got a job. To pay the deductible on your bills Mr. Harmon. There’s another reason to be an overachiever when it comes to recovery.”

Dean watches Sam lick his dry lips, and then Sam squeezes his hand once.

“Take off. I’ll find you.”

He laughs, because there’s nothing else to do.

“No.”

“Dean.”

“What’s sunsong?” It isn’t right, Dean knows it, but his brain isn’t exactly at top performance levels, and he’s basically giving up on even _trying_ for recall. He just wants to change the subject before Sam starts a fight.

“What?”

“Exactly.”

Sam frowns and then shakes his head.

“Dunno.”

“Who’s Captain Black?”

That one is right, and there’s a shadow on Sam’s face before his brother squeezes his hand and shakes his head.

“Why?”

“It’s what you said. Before. When you were going back under.”

Sam lifts a sardonic eyebrow and Dean resists the urge to pinch his brother.

“Morphine.”

It’s a fine answer, but Dean isn’t sure it’s true. There was something there for a moment on Sam’s face. Something like recognition, or even concern, but it’s gone and Dean doesn’t have the energy to chase it. If Sam is going to remember he will. Most likely at the least convenient time for Dean possible.

He settles back into the soft chair with his fingers still linked with Sam’s and hits the remote to turn the TV on. Sam doesn’t argue, and they watch together in companionable silence.

\----

Dean’s first day at the bookstore coincides with Sam’s first battery of serious recovery tests. Sam is both sorry to have Dean gone and glad. His brother doesn’t get to enjoy how well Sam handles the breath test, but he also isn’t there to hear the less positive aspects of Sam’s expected recovery.

They’re leaning more towards the longer period before Sam will be able to leave the hospital. Their projected amount of physical therapy for Sam to move from walker to quad cane, they’re not even willing to _guess_ how long before he walks unassisted, is incredibly depressing. Sam imagines them trying to get the walker in and out of the Impala, making up stories for it during investigations, and using it to maneuver around graveyards.

Just the attempt has Sam on the verge of a panic attack, and with the way Dean’s been acting Sam isn’t certain that subsuming the fear won’t end with Dean in a hospital bed next to his.

When it is almost too much Sam grips his hand closed and imagines that Dean is holding it. He thinks of the sensation of Dean’s fingers linked with his. It’s a common enough occurrence, but since Dean spent all of last night and the night before doing it Sam doesn’t have to strain to pull it to the forefront of his mind.

The doctor, Jorgenson Sam has learned, is very good at his job. His bedside manner is perfect, and he delivers everything with a straightforward but hopeful inflection. Sam wants to punch him in the face and he doesn’t know why.

They’ve moved Sam to liquids and soft food, and Dean arrives just in time to grin devilishly and then grab Sam’s spoon and tray. For half a second Sam thinks Dean is going to eat his dinner, but instead Dean scoops up a full spoonful of applesauce and makes a train noise before zooming the spoon to Sam’s lips.

It is only logical that Sam bypasses the spoon and bites his brother’s hand. It’s what Dean has earned.

Dean, for his part, keeps his shriek quiet. He takes the path of drama in waving his hand all over and hissing like he’s in a ton of pain. Sam isn’t impressed.

“I’m just trying to be helpful.”

There’s a smudge of dirt on Dean’s cheek, and Sam is dying to clean it off. He can’t though, so he reclaims his spoon and eats the applesauce grumpily. It’s still too hard to make full sentences, so Sam needs to be strategic with his words.

“So, it turns out I’m a great stock boy. Like, just totally awesome.”

He pushes down the applesauce and looks over Dean’s shoulder at the window and then back to his brother.

“Out there? Like Norman Rockwall.”

“Well.”

Dean laughs, forced but there, and Sam is willing to take it.

“Always gotta be the know-it-all, even when you can barely talk. You got a collapsed lung to bounce back from how about you don’t fight with me?”

Sam huffs and takes another bite of applesauce.

“But seriously. It could not be any more old school out there. The streets are tiny, the shops are all old-fashioned. The one I’m working in? It has one of those old iron cash registers that’s huge and fancy and has the tabs that pop up every time you make a sale.”

Sam thinks about that for a second, eyes roaming around the hospital room before landing back on Dean to have him continue the story.

“And the owner is _ancient_. Probably the second oldest person I’ve ever met after that math teacher you had.”

Sam feels his lips purse in annoyance. He hates when Dean brings that asshole up. Dean didn’t have to deal with her cheek pinching habits. Dean knows it too because he laughs at Sam the second he sees his face.

“Yeah. So that’s nice. There’s like two cops, and a little shop next to the bookstore. It’s probably the size of a convenience store. And then there’s a pharmacy with the fancy sign and like one pharmacist that knows everybody’s names. A diner with a waitress named Phyllis. An auto shop that has no lift. I don’t how the fuck they think they’re going to fix anything serious with that.”

Sam puts the applesauce down and looks back at the window. He wants to see this. Dean’s not a bad storyteller, but in the end Sam has always experienced things first hand. Dean looks at Sam for a long time, looks back at the window, and then he leans forward and talks very softly.

“Ok. They’re gonna start dragging you out of this thing soon to make you walk around anyway. So, if you’re very good and don’t breathe too deep in excitement I’ll take you to the window.”

Sam finds himself nodding like a four-year-old and instantly feels embarrassed. Dean ignores it, smiling indulgently before lifting Sam carefully out of the bed and taking him to the window. The IV stand and the monitoring equipment don’t have to reach far. The window is close to the bed in the little room.

Dean takes him right up to the glass and Sam sees exactly what his brother meant. There’s a main street with businesses and then there’s a smattering of houses outside of it. There’s no apartment buildings and no slums. It’s all just perfect, an idyllic village set in the center of what appears to be a great forest. Sam studies it carefully, trying to figure out which building is Dean’s new job.

And then the voice is back.

_Good luck, Captain Black_.

Sam feels his pulse spike, hears the machine registering it behind him. Dean is rushing him back to the bed but Sam can feel his hands shaking as something in the back of his head tells him that he knows that. He _knows_ it but he doesn’t know why. Something about a town, Something about Norman Rockwell.

But that’s crazy. That’s the morphine because it was _Dean_ that said it was Rockwell. It was Dean that told him about the place. Not that voice talking in his head. Not that ominous warning he can’t understand or shake.

Sam feels his face being turned. His chin is in Dean’s hand and Dean is right in his face breathing slow and steady, breath smelling like cheese and meat.

“Listen to me Sammy. Listen to me. It’s alright. It’s alright. Everything is fine. I’m right here and so are you so you gotta calm down. Match my breathing. Breathe with me.”

But Sam can’t. Something is coming for them. Something has _come_.

Dean lifts his hand and distantly Sam knows that his brother is still there, but he feels like he’s thousands of miles away on Mars looking down.

His palm lands on Dean’s chest, solid and sure, lifting and falling slow and steady despite the beat underneath it that betrays Dean’s fear.

“Sammy. Look at me. I won’t let anything else bad happen to you. I’m here. Look at me. Nothing’s going to happen to you while I’m around. I mean it.”

And Sam finds his breath. He follows Dean’s breathing, pushing hard on the panic and trying to keep in mind that whatever it was that set it off it wasn’t something supernatural. It’s somehow connected to the injury. It’s the rebar poles’ damage to him that’s making him think that the world is falling part. He’ll ask the doctor about it. He’ll get a good explanation then.

In the meantime, Sam narrows down on Dean until his brother is literally _and_ figuratively his whole world. Stays there until Dean has him under control.

And then a nurse and the doctor are rushing in and Dean is pushed away from him. Moments later the heat of the morphine rushes into his veins and Sam is falling into sleep.

_This couldn’t be Heaven._

Dean sits beside Sam’s bed and takes long slow breaths of the air inside the hospital room. It tastes bad, and he wishes they had windows that would open. Not that it’s a feature in any hospital, but this one is so old and different Dean kind of hoped for a second it would break protocol.

Sam is sleeping now, eyes moving at a rapid pace behind his eyelids, and Dean thinks of the doctor’s stern warning not to over excite Sam before leaving the room. The guy is nice, but Dean will be damned if he needs to be told how to take care of his little brother. If he hadn’t shown Sam the window Sam would have gotten up to see it himself.

He stands, stretches to crack his back, and then steps into the bathroom and sees a smudge of ink from the bookstore on his cheek. He turns the water on hot and wonders how much that drove Sam crazy.

Not that Sam can clearly tell him.

They’ve got a long road ahead of them, and Dean has to figure out how to navigate it. It’s all well and good for him and Sam to sleep here in the hospital as long as they need Sam to stay, but what about after? When Sam’s released he’ll still need therapy. He’ll still need care. And they can’t reliably get that on the road.

His boss, and how fucking weird is that phrase in his head, told him that there’s a room for rent upstairs. Dean wonders if maybe Sam would agree to that. It’s a short walk from the hospital. An even shorter drive if Sam isn’t able to do that by then.

They could stay, for a while, just to get Sam literally back on his own two feet. And then what?

Dean knows that Sam dreamt of this, well not _this_ but of the whole settling down mythology. And yet now that it’s here Dean can see that Sam doesn’t want it. That he really wants to move on to the next thing. Whether he thinks that’s necessary to keep Dean from dipping on him, or if that’s just Sam _now_ , Dean isn’t sure.

What he is sure about is that Sam needs the care. Sam needs the time.

And Dean is going to make sure he gets it.

He strips down and washes in the sink, an old practice made easier by the hospital’s climate control, and then heads back into the room. Sam didn’t finish his applesauce and Dean polishes it off before reclining in the big chair and drifting off to sleep.

For just a moment he thinks that he hears two sets of breathing, but it’s just Sam sleeping and dreaming, riding on the morphine.

Sam and Dean. That’s all he hears.

Dean dreams sporadically, something in the darkness creeping up on Sam, something coming for his brother in the silences between the wind rushing through the trees and the squeaks of non-slip rubber soles on hospital floors. Something chasing without remorse or pause.

When he wakes up he’s pretty sure his neck is made of iron, and he almost resents Sam in the comfortable hospital bed. _Almost_.

Sam sleeps through Dean leaving for the bookstore. He goes about his duties as quickly as he can, eager to get back before Sam is served dinner to make sure that his picky brother at least gets that down.

Except when he comes back Sam’s tray is empty and his brother is using one hand to type sluggishly on the laptop. Dean leans around the screen to look at what his brother is looking at as well.

SparkNotes on _Catch-22_.

Dean sighs, closes the laptop, and then sits beside Sam. His brother is obviously pissed.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? A book report? You’re supposed to be resting and watching trash TV.”

Sam gestures at the laptop as if that explains everything and then points around the room.

“Wrong.”

His brother’s face is grim, and Dean follows Sam’s gaze before returning his own to his brother’s expression.

“What’s wrong?”

Sam gestures again and Dean shakes his head.

“I don’t get it. What’s wrong Sammy? The hospital room? It’s pretty standard.”

Sam’s face gets incredibly petulant, a Greek mask version of his usual bitchface.

“Town.”

Dean blinks, brain processing that, and then leans in and takes Sam’s hand.

“It’s just a town Sam. We’ve been to a hundred of them. I don’t get what you’re trying to say.”

“Doctor. Street. People. Wrong.”

_Oh shit_.

The doctor warned Dean that Sam was without real oxygen for a while. That the combination of that and the head trauma from when Sam originally hit the ground could combine badly with the painkillers and cause paranoia and panic.

He saw the latter yesterday, and he’s seeing the former now.

“Sammy. It’s just a town ok? It’s just a little town. They’re weird because we’re not used to staying in them. Because we’re not used to getting lucky with them. But it’s nothing beyond that. The doc said-“

“Captain Black.”

Sam’s said it once before hasn’t he? Dean casts back in his memories and tries to pick out what the context was. Sam was post-surgery. Sam had just escaped death. Sam was too messed up to know what he was really saying.

“Who’s Captain Black, Sam? I don’t know that name. I don’t know why you keep saying it. I’ve met at least half of the town by now and nobody with that name has come out of the woodwork.”

Sam’s mouth puckers, and his hand plucks at the sheet draped over him as Dean watches him fight his own brain.

“Captain Black. Character.”

“A…a book character? You think there’s something wrong because of a book character?”

Sam flushes, color suffusing his overly pale cheeks and looking too dramatic on his face. Dean reaches out and takes Sam’s constantly moving hand, comfortable with the gesture if it will just take that look off of Sam’s face.

“No. Voice. Voice said.”

Dean looks around the room, and then back at Sam. Stir crazy maybe? Sam always makes fun of him for not being able to sit still, but his brother has never been much better. Maybe that’s the real problem.

“Stay here. Just a second.”

A voice. Maybe something Sam heard while under the drugs? The EMTs were in the ambulance alone with Sam, the doctor and the nurses were alone with Sam in the operating room, so maybe somebody said it then. Something Sam carried in the back of his brain that’s surfacing now that he’s a little clearer.

Dean finds the head nurse at the station and points to Sam’s room with his thumb.

“Any chance he can go on a little ride? I’ll go real slow, no wheelies. Promise.”

She giggles, nods, and then puts on a serious face.

“I’ll get him all set up if you’ll help lift him, but don’t leave the hospital grounds and no longer than a half hour. Got it, mister?”

The last is said flirtatiously, and Dean leans on the counter and waggles an eyebrow just to see her blush.

“Aye aye, captain.”

Something about it sends a shudder down his spine, Sam’s paranoia infecting him.

“Ok. Come with me, let’s bust him loose.”

Dean rolls Sam slowly down the halls and out the back door he’s been using to get to the little parking lot. Sam is taking shallow breaths, eyes moving everywhere over the parking lot as Dean rolls him to the Impala. He takes his brother’s hand, the left one that isn’t attached to the side of Sammy’s chest that has a hole in it.

“Sam. Do you see Baby?”

Sam nods, his eyes moving back and forth between Dean’s face and the Impala.

“Feel her.”

Dean puts Sam’s hand on the car that is their home, keeps his own over Sam’s. The metal is smooth, shiny, and warm from the sun. More than once this has been Dean’s way to steady himself. To put the world’s spinning back to the appropriate speed.

His little brother’s hand eventually relaxes under his. His body goes slack and he looks from Baby back to Dean.

“Dumb.”

“Yeah. Sure. It’s dumb. But it’s also working.”

Sam grunts, face disgruntled and slightly petulant.

“It always works for me. When I’m afraid, when everything seems treacherous, when I don’t know where we’re going. This is our home Sammy, but it’s also our escape route. You see how little time it took to get you here? Something, _anything_ , goes wrong and I’ll have you out of here. Lickety split. I’m keeping my eyes peeled Sammy. But there ain’t nothing to worry about yet except your health.”

There’s a long silence where Sam keeps his hand on Baby. Then he turns it in Dean’s loose grip and closes it weakly around the flesh that is warming up in the sun.

“You.”

Dean lifts an eyebrow. It’s his turn to be unable to talk.

“You home. You escape.”

Something shifts in Dean’s chest. Something stirs and spreads making his fingers tingle and his cheeks flush. It’s a feeling Dean hasn’t had in a long time.

“Don’t be a girl.”

There’s no malice in the words. Dean can’t manage that right now and Sam seems to know it. His little brother smiles and squeezes his hand once weakly before he gestures toward the hospital. Dean rolls him back in.


	3. Chapter 3

“Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.”   
― **Stephen King,**[ **Duma Key**](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3041864)

Sam waits to be resettled. He can’t believe he did that. Out in the parking lot. It’s honestly amazing that Dean didn’t make more jokes about it.

But Sam’s willing to take a miracle right now. Logically, _logically_ , Sam knew that Dean wouldn’t actually leave him here. But logic doesn’t always rule when pain is in residence. The morphine is slowly ebbing, dying off and leaving Sam in a place where the burning and aching is starting to growl and crawl through his body.

Dean helps him eat, more soft foods and a bland broth that Sam hates more than he thought he could. After he finishes he hits the morphine button and relaxes back into the shifting mattress. His brother rolls his head slowly, neck creaking, and Sam takes a good look at the chair Dean has been sleeping in.

“Get in the bed.”

His brother looks away from the droning tv, eyes wide with surprise, and then he shakes his head.

“No dude. What if I roll over and hit something?”

Sam starts to rock, trying to move himself over, and Dean rushes out of the chair to stop him.

“This, Sammy. This shit is the reason that you’re in this bed in the first place. This shit is the reason I can’t take you anywhere. So stubborn you’ve cut your nose off more times than Michael Jackson.”

He grunts, and Dean gently helps him over and then slides into the bed next to him. It’s a tight fit, tight enough that Sam isn’t really worried about either of them rolling anywhere or hitting anything, but from the tension in Dean’s body he can tell that his brother hasn’t made the same deduction.

“When the nurses come in this is really gonna throw them.”

Sam shrugs with his one good arm and then settles into Dean’s side. He feels better. More relaxed than he remembers being in a long time. The warmth of the morphine makes it easier to ignore the pain. To float above it. Dean’s heartbeat is steady, his leg jitters gently every now and then, and his fingers twitch and brush against Sam’s thigh in a gentle, subconscious caress.

Something nags at the back of Sam’s brain again. It’s always right here, on the edge of darkness as the morphine carries him over the doorway into sleep, that the words start to come to him. Although this time it’s not a word. This time it’s an image.

Norman Rockwell, a painting of a quaint little village picturing an America that never existed in reality. You can tell it’s a fake image because there’s no powerlines. No telephone lines. And while it wasn’t really a thing at the height of Rockwell’s fame there’s no cellphone tower.

Little details that made Rockwell a hack, that lessened the reality of his little pictures of small town Americana, but that often went unnoticed because people didn’t want to see the mistakes. People didn’t want to see that perfection wasn’t the real world.

_Goddamn Norman Rockwell had no idea what Heaven looked like_.

Dean wakes up when the nurse comes in. It’s not the same cute little number that let him sneak Sam out. She’s older, sharper eyed, and she looks at Dean thoughtfully before ignoring him to check Sam’s vitals and lift his gown to look over the bandages.

“Don’t hit anything.” The nurse’s voice is dry instead of disapproving.

She doesn’t speak again, clearing Sam’s IV and checking his lines before she slips back out of the room. Dean rolls his eyes and then mutters quietly to his sleeping brother.

“What the hell does she know? You always hit first.”

Sam doesn’t have a snarky reply. His face is pale, eyelashes dark on the whiteness of his sallow cheeks. His brother has always had a slightly darker skin tone than him. Dean has fought jealousy over it for a long time since Sam has managed to absorb the sun and make it flattering while Dean just gets more freckles and sunburn.

They share blood, they should share sunburn.

Despite the fact that the nurse checked everything Dean checks again. There’s no blood clotting the line, and Sam’s not bleeding through any of the bandages. He runs his hands up the smooth skin of Sam’s stomach until he hits the heavy line of bandages on his little brother’s chest.

So close. So fucking close. If it had been the other side Sam would have been a goner.

He thinks it would be smarter to get out of the bed. Safer for Sam, safer for both of them in case the business only nurse is replaced by a gossiping one. This town is old school. Rumors would only make sure that Dean would have to carry Sam broken and bleeding over the town line and to the next hospital.

And then?

And then the next and the next as they get busted every time.

Dean has always had this sort of endless battle to contend with. He links fingers with Sam again and feels his little brother’s body slot perfectly into his. It was like this when they were little, side by side in the dark with fear and worry lingering just outside of the perfect matching pair they created together.

Goddamn he’s sleepy. He’s thinking in romance novel language.

But wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t that why Dean stopped doing this? Romance novel language.

Two-way, Dean found out very late in the game, but romance novel language nonetheless. And neither of them could have that.

Winchesters, after all, were not well known for long-lasting relationships. Why tempt death with another red flag?

Dean drifts off to sleep, unsure of the direction of his own thoughts or the reasoning behind them.

Sam is still in the hospital. He’s still in the hospital but the door is cracked and something. Something tells him to look.

Dean is asleep beside him, fingers linked tight and breath heavy. So warm against him that Sam almost ignores that little voice that he hears.

But how can he? Forever was never meant to be and this is _zugzwang_.

This is their endgame. Sam can feel destiny pulling them forward like the tide, dragging them down into an inevitable future and drowning them together.

So, Sam looks. He sees the light peeking through the opening, and then he sees his mother stop at the door and peek in. The face he knows only from pictures and one ghostly appearance, smiles at them, and then disappears.

Pain spikes, bright and living, crawling through Sam’s chest and past his heart. Pain cripples his brain and he is simply a little boy clinging to Dean as the panic eats him alive along with the agony. There’s something screaming, Dean is waking up, but goddamn it.

_Mommy_.

“Night terrors. It’s not very common in someone his age, but morphine can cause sleep-wake disorders and that could bring a night terror.”

Sam is sleeping now, sedated, and Dean is left holding his own hands so tightly that he thinks he might break them. Jorgenson looks exhausted, run down, the way doctors since the beginning of time have looked at three in the morning.

Dean would feel more sympathy for him if his pulse would slow down enough to consider it clearly. At the moment though all he can hear is that high pitched terror-scream that Sam was letting pour out of him. The way Sam’s eyes were wide open, staring at the door as if he saw the devil standing there again.

“He’s been on morphine before. He’s never-“

But that’s not true. Sam has had night terrors before. Granted, some of them have been more future related than what currently haunted his little brother’s brain. But he’s had them.

And he was on opioids for some of them. There’s a whole bag of shit in their trunk that Sam’s taken before, and Dean can’t catalog what all has made Sam jerk and toss and fight in the night. Sure, the screaming sounded terrifying, but fuck Sam’s never had it with a hole in his chest before.

Dean‘s never fucked up this bad before.

“He’s never what?”

“I never made the connection before.”

Jorgenson is as sympathetic as a man who looks on the verge of collapse can be.

“It’s not an easy one to make sometimes. And I doubt he’s been a long-term user so it’s not like you would have been looking directly for it. But there’s not a lot we can do for it because there’s not much that’ll help with pain on his part of the scale outside of the opioid category. There’s an anti-psychotic that gets prescribed along with painkillers a lot. The dosage can be upped as needed and it’ll keep him asleep. Some patients report vivid dreams with it, but he won’t wake up thrashing and set his recovery back. Do you want to try it?”

Dean looks back at his sleeping brother, face drawn and pale, and then to Jorgenson again. Sam has always been willful. It’s something Dean has loved about him since his baby brother was staying up all night to practice his reading, to study for tests that didn’t even exist, to be _Sam_. He can’t possibly do this to Sam. He can’t make this decision without talking to Sam at all.

_But he’s hurting. He’s saying ouchie so much, and it’s all you Dean_.

He doesn’t even question where the voice comes from.

“Do it.”

He’ll tell Sam later, when they’re on the road and headed away. When Sam is himself again.

When the sound of that scream leaves him.

“Was awake.”

Dean’s trying to get him to eat more mashed potatoes, but Sam has an axe to grind.

“Yeah, Sam. Technically you were awake.”

“No. _Awake_.”

It’s the sticking point. Dean believes that he was awake in only the most technical of senses, because technically a night terror is a form of being awake. But that wasn’t it.

Sam can’t remember what he was thinking when he saw mom, what made him wake up and look at the door in the first place, but he knows that he was awake when he did.

“Sammy, it’s a hospital door. It’s shut. It’s heavy and it shuts. It was shut when I opened my eyes and you were screaming. When the alarms were going off. It didn’t open until a nurse and the doc opened it. You were not awake. The door was closed and mom- mom ain’t here. You and I both know that.”

It’s so frustrating to have to budget his words. It’s so frustrating to have Dean be like this. _This is what they do_ , and Dean is acting like the stupid husband in the first ten minutes of the horror movie that dismisses his wife’s concerns. The one that dies in the very beginning so the protagonists can move in.

“Saw her. Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah you’re goddamn right something’s wrong. You got two rebar poles thrown into you. You’re full of fucking holes and you died on the table for a couple seconds. You _died_ Sam and nobody knows how that fucks with you more than us. You’re recovering. Your brain didn’t have oxygen. You’re supposed to be paranoid and fucking scared and maybe a little damaged.”

He hates Dean in that moment. Just a little, but enough to make the burn in his chest take on a second meaning. He hates Dean enough to turn his head away, the closest he can come to walking out, and simply not respond.

“I didn’t. Look I didn’t mean. Not like. Sam. _Sam_.”

But he doesn’t answer. Fuck Dean for thinking that this is brain damage. That Sam is _damaged_.

And no shit Sam is damaged. Since when was that news?

“Fuck it. I have to go to work. Eat your fucking food.”

It’s obviously a struggle for Dean to not slam the door. He is victorious. Sam on the other hand doesn’t stop himself from throwing the plastic spoon and then sucking his breath in at the pain.

He struggles to get to the laptop, pushing the food aside to make room so he can start to look again. He begins in the Spark Notes one more time, but he already knows this is the wrong character and the wrong story.

There’s _something_ telling Sam something important. It’s not like the dreams, it’s a memory of knowledge that Sam can’t quite grasp. And he doesn’t know how to get there.

But he has an idea how to prove what’s happening. He needs to keep calm. He needs to prove that it’s not some form of brain damage or dementia, that he’s just as focused and sane as he always is. If he can do that, if he can stay calm and get Dean to see what he’s seeing about this place then they can escape.

So tonight he’ll stay up. Tonight he’ll keep himself awake and wait for the door to open again. Wait for something to come whose existence he can finally prove.


	4. Chapter 4

“The difference  
between being bound  
and being connected  
is perception.”   
― **Olivia Barnes,**[ **Bramble**](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/65379745)

“Dean?”

Dean looks up from the stack of books to see the shop’s owner staring at him thoughtfully. Mr. Campbell is ancient, and Dean legitimately cannot understand how this old man got by before Dean showed up. It’s kind of impressive he doesn’t blow away when the books close or the door opens.

“Yes sir?”

Mr. Campbell smiles, an ancient, wrinkled apple pulling itself up in the middle, and totters three steps before sitting on a bench beside Dean.

“You should be back at the hospital. Didn’t you say your brother was going to start the exercises today?”

“Yeah. But they’re not the serious ones yet, they’re the little test ones. And he’s gonna be the grouchiest son of a-guy you’ve ever seen.”

It was like cursing in front of America’s great-grandpa, and Dean ducked his head so he couldn’t see the sparkling of Campbell’s eyes as he slotted the books into their right spots.

“Will you tell me a little about him?”

“Why?” Dean’s hand pauses, a copy of some historical text dangling in his fingertips.

“’Memory believes before knowing remembers.’”

“What does that mean?”

Mr. Campbell is smiling mischievously when Dean looks up, a look that Dean has come to recognize in his time working with his new boss.

“You’d have to ask Faulkner, I just read them I don’t explain them.”

“Well tell my brother that.” He mutters it more than says it, trying to figure out where this next one goes. Half of the reason it seems Campbell likes to watch him work is just that the old man loves to see Dean try to classify things based entirely on the book jacket. His percentage of accuracy is really not that bad all things considered.

“Your brother like reading?”

Dean laughs, once, thinking of the digital spark notes.

“Yeah. He loves it.”

Campbell smiles. He gets up slowly and starts puttering around. A small stack begins to collect on the counter as Campbell moves from shelf to shelf in the contained, little store. Eventually there are six books there, varying thickness and age, and Campbell looks over them humming softly to himself before he turns back to Dean.

“There we go. Take these back to the hospital with you and give them to him for me? From one bibliophile to another.”

Dean blinks, once, twice, and then tries to smile through the sting of pride and hunger that suddenly rushes up in him. It’s familiar, he’s done this before more than once.

“Thanks, but I’d rather my money go to what’s important.”

Campbell takes a step forward, another, wobbling on the third. Dean moves fast, always fast, and has his elbows before the old man can even try to reach for a counter or shelf that might not hold him.

“I said gift, Dean.”

“I don’t understand.”

Campbell’s eyes go soft, sad, and Dean bites back that shame again. He’s used to tasting it, but it’s been a while.

“Tell me more about your brother Sam, who likes reading and taking care of everyone else before himself. Tell me about Sam who is guilty and full of regret like an old man on his deathbed. Tell me more about the brother you love so much, because I like to see your face light up. Because it reminds me of a different time and place, when I had more than I have now and infinitely less. Tell me about your brother and then, because the happy stories you share about him make me happy too, give him a stack of books to enjoy and let me enjoy that vicariously through you. Can you do that for me, Dean?”

And yeah. He can.

“When we were kids he was always reading. Just like. Way more than he had to and way more than I ever would have thought was necessary. And it ended up being like a lightning rod effect for everyone around him. We moved around a lot. He didn’t make the kind of friends that buffer you from that. And I used to get so mad all the time. I mean, I had to be careful because I’m older and you can’t just beat the shit out of little kids. Sorry. Stuff.”

Campbell smiles again, that wrinkled apple grin.

“I know that word.”

Dean laughs. It’s unexpected.

“So, I taught him. I taught him how to stay away from them, and how to handle them, and I would occasionally handle them myself if it was bad enough because sometimes you gotta break the rules for family. And I thought I was so fu-freaking tough and big and he was so small. But you know, when you get overconfident you get knocked down. So, this one day I was in class, and I got called on to answer something. I didn’t do the reading, I didn’t care, but this teacher just went to town on me. Spent like fifteen minutes telling the class how useless I was. And then he asked me how I ever thought I’d graduate if I was that stupid and I said I wasn’t planning on graduating and he started laughing. And everybody else laughed too. And that was when I dropped out of high school.”

His boss isn’t smiling anymore. The old man is leaning heavily on the counter, his face turned down and serious. Serious in a way Dean really hadn’t expected or wanted to see. But he can’t stop now.

“Our dad didn’t care because he planned on me taking over the family business and it didn’t require a diploma. But Sam. Sammy took it really personal. I didn’t know that at the time, but he did. Then Sam makes me take him to three stores to get all the paper and tape he says he needs for some huge project. And next thing I know I’m driving him to school and there are signs and a billboard. All this sh-stuff he assembled together on buildings, on marquees, and then on one of those drunk driving billboards. They lead to the school and they’re all around it. And every one has the guy’s personal info on it along with statements. And they’re all true. He’s cheating on his wife, he verbally abuses his students, he wears a bunny suit on the weekends that isn’t Easter related. There are pictures, big images put together from printer paper. I don’t even know how he did it. He never admitted it was him. But I knew. And this…hole in my chest I didn’t want to admit was there closed up. It’s wasn’t even my pride really that was hurt it was something deeper, and Sammy fixed it without me ever asking or even understanding what it was.”

When Dean looks up from his task Campbell’s lip is quivering. Dean averts his eyes and gives the older man a moment to get himself together before he looks back.

His boss digs around and puts a book in the center of the stack intended for Sam with a look on his face that Dean can’t read. He doesn’t care for it.

“He sounds amazing. You should head on home, Dean. Take your brother the books. He _needs_ them.”

And there’s something, something buried in the bottom of Campbell’s tone that Dean knows he should pay more attention to but now he’s a little embarrassed that he picked that story and told it to this man. Not even really sure why, and not willing to stick around and ask himself while still under Campbell’s gaze.

Instead he thanks Campbell, slips the books into the bag he brings to and from work with sandwiches from the hospital, and makes the short hike back to his brother.

Sam has finished what feels like a thousand years of torture but is really just an hour of the beginning of physiotherapy. The last thirty minutes was a massage, which you might think would have been easier but it was not.

He hates Jorgenson. Dean is coming back any minute and the guy is telling Sam how great he did and all Sam can think of is how the guy just reeks of desperation. The reason he wants Sam to like him so fucking bad Sam can’t begin to imagine.

“-and really you should be proud. You’re doing the best you possibly can and a lot of people aren’t willing to push themselves that hard.”

Dean walks in on that, his bag hanging lower than when he left and his eyebrows raised as he takes in the scene in front of him. Jorgenson begins extolling all the progress Sam has made in one night and how strong and focused he is. Sam is just staring at Dean’s sagging bag.

He kind of hates how Dean is walking to work. He knows why, because if he doesn’t Baby will be too far from Sam for Sam to flee, but at the moment everything is too far for Sam to flee even with the wheelchair. Better Dean has the car to get out in time if it’s necessary than Sam to be able to stare at the goddamn thing while the cops take his brother away.

Maybe he’s a little grouchy.

When the doctor finally leaves Sam points at the backpack and gathers himself. “What’d you steal?”

Dean’s lips quirk, and he settles into the bed beside Sam with their sides pressed together tight. Sam thinks of how hesitant Dean was not too long ago, and wonders if maybe this is a good sign. His brother digs in the bag, and then places a stack of books very carefully onto the tray that holds Sam’s dinner.

“Didn’t steal them. My boss said he thought you were an egghead and that you’d want something to be eggheady over.”

And fucking. Sam’s fingers itch at the sight of them. He reaches out carefully, left arm leading because the right has the IV and moving it pulls on his chest. He wants to start lowering the morphine. He wants to be able to really put together for Dean everything he’s missing.

But he also wants to see what Dean brought back. The first on the stack is a hardbound copy of _The Blue Fairy Book_ which Sam finds amusing. The next is a paperback Grisham that Sam immediately files as pointless because he is done with the law from that perspective. _The Lathe of Heaven_ is next, and Sam vaguely remembers the author but doesn’t recognize the title. Jess was a big science fiction fan, and Sam wonders if she would have read this. There’s an autobiography of Frederick Douglass and Sam adds that to the keep pile. There’re two books left, and Sam’s hand stutters on the way to the next one.

His tongue goes thick, but Sam knows if he reacts too much Dean might take the book away. And that itch in his fingers and the terrible taste of impending failure and fear tells him that whatever is happening here something in this stack of books is the answer. And it’s maybe this one or the next one.

Sam feels a drop beyond his feet, something deep and dark in front of him and nowhere to back up.

_The Martian Chronicles_. Sam slides the book over just enough to look at the next one too. _Burnt Offerings_. He racks his brain but the second one means nothing to him at all. The first one though. He remembers Jess lounging in their bed with an old, beat up copy of this book. He remembers the soft skin of her thighs as she read aloud to him in between breathy moans. Sam is embarrassed that he’s both aroused and terrified. He covers it by looking up to Dean’s expectant face.

“Can you thank him for me?”

The morphine has mostly worn off and Sam is hurting more than he should be able to say, but it helps him sharpen his focus. Helps him put the mask into place that will allow for tricking Dean into not trying to take these away.

Because one of them, he’s pretty sure, is the reason Sam is having panic attacks.

Dean’s face brightens, big and wide smile making Sam’s odd arousal intensify. And he can indulge that a little right now because he’s got an answer at hand. He knows it in his bones.

“Yeah, sure I can. One nerd gives to another right? Hey, you want something special from the cafeteria to celebrate? It sounds like you did awesome.”

“Sure.”

Dean takes off, and Sam is left alone with the books. He studies both of them, fingers itching. He can’t start right away, he’s too tired and run down, and he needs Dean to be gone while he reads because if something sets him off Dean will take them away.

He makes a decision, spur of the moment, and puts _Burnt Offerings_ on top and _The Martian Chronicles_ right below. Then he arranges the rest of the stack in place before Dean can return. Sam also uses this short time to readjust himself as best he can with only one easily movable arm and a bad leg.

And then his brother comes back with two Styrofoam plates with angel food cake and a cardboard milk carton. They lay side by side, devouring cake and sharing the milk carton. Dean turns on the TV, and some reality show drones in the background while Sam soaks in the warmth and comfort of having Dean right there. The familiarity of sharing movement and heat.

“Dean?”

“Yeah, Sammy?”

“You like it here?”

Dean’s head tilts to the side and he looks like he doesn’t know what to make of that. He chews on it as the TV drones on.

“I like it _here_.” Dean nudges him once with his shoulder when he says it.

Sam closes his eyes and sinks into Dean to hide a sudden flood of tears.

Fucking morphine makes you emotional.

Dean watches Sam struggle, watches him fight without understanding that’s what he’s doing, and then eventually his brother slips into unconsciousness and Dean takes the chance to check him over, to look at the bandages, to make sure there’s no blood leaking through, and he sees only what he’s supposed to.

His thumb rubs on the skin of Sam’s chest, just below the tape and to the side of the bandages that cover what was a gaping hole in Sam’s skin.

Too close. It was too close. Dean feels his blood pressure spiking when he thinks about it.

With the wounds closing up Dean makes a mental note to check with the doctor and see if Sam can have pajama pants. Something to get him out of the hospital gown. Nobody likes hospital gowns.

Sam’s eyes move rapidly behind his closed lids, and Dean wonders what he’s dreaming. If the drugs are making him have nightmares. If the drug nightmares are worse than the brain damage ones.

He links fingers with Sam again, staring at his brother’s ashen face and wondering what he should do. What he’s going to do. They aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Time passes slowly, the TV droning on as he stares at Sam and thinks. There’s only so much that Dean can predict and plan for before he’s just making himself paranoid and insane. He’s well aware that he’s his own greatest enemy.

Shadows grow, the nurse slips in and then out again, and Dean starts to drift. His eyes are heavy, drooping, and he looks over at the hospital window and sees the full moon shining up high in the sky.

A sense, something moving quietly in the back of his brain, grips Dean. Half-awake, fugue like, he gets out of the bed and heads to the window. The town square is lit up, beautiful and cold in the moonlight, and Dean licks his lips as he looks at the lay of the land.

It’s all normal, all right, except something is wrong. And Dean waits, blinks, and then sees a little white smudge with blonde hair. A woman. Moving in the shadows of the trees thrown into relief by the moonlight. A memory more than anything else, a woman Dean would know from any distance and any lighting. Especially in that nightgown.

Dean swallows hard, hand coming into contact with the cold glass, and that wakes him up.

There’s nothing there, the woman is gone. There’s nothing there it’s just in his head. He’s exhausted, he’s run down, and he needs a break. He’s catching it from Sam.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

Contrary to years of training, of experience, of _everything_ , Dean simply climbs into the bed with his brother and slips under the covers. He’s not hiding. He’s not a child.

He’s simply deciding to be cuddly. Dean can be cuddly.

Everything is fine, and this is a decision Dean has made.

Sam wakes up in the dark. How did he fall asleep?

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He was going to stay up. He was going to stay up until Dean fell asleep and then he was going to read. Instead he somehow passed out and he doesn’t remember it happening.

It’s incredibly dark, and Sam wonders why the moon isn’t at least adding some light. The only illumination is a strip coming through the door and making a tiny pathway into the main hospital.

Sam’s eyes follow it and see a shapely calf, a pale foot, a smooth knee that promises so much more. And then the vision is gone. He rubs his face and waits, but it doesn’t come back.

And he knows deep down inside that if he stays in the bed with Dean it’ll stay gone. It’s all a part of his head injury. It’s all a tragic mistake.

But this is also where they’ve always been headed, and he should have known that.

So, Sam stands up. It’s surprisingly easy. He slips out of Dean’s hands and past the bed, gown billowing around him in the annoying way only a hospital gown can. He heads for the hallway looking around for what he knows will just be the briefest of glimpses. And there she is again although this time it’s her skinny wrist and the long delicate fingers that used to stroke his hair back from his forehead.

He follows her, like a foolish sailor diving into the ocean and swimming towards the sirens, and finds a dead end. Jess isn’t here. No one is. It’s just brick, dark red and glistening, and Sam steps up to it quietly. He puts one hand on the surface and feels how warm and wet it is. How it moves just slightly under his hand. As if the brick is surging up to respond to the presence of his flesh.

Tired. He’s suddenly so tired and dizzy but he’s far away from the room and the safety of Dean. Far from Baby and the escape that was promised. Stuck here in this dead end with all the inevitability of their fates lined up in front of him and crashing down.

And Sam knows in that moment exactly what’s happening. He remembers why he’s there, and how he got there; he remembers that he was warned. And he didn’t accept that warning. He doomed them both.

Consciousness hit him like a tidal wave and Sam jerks in bed and slaps into Dean. His brother grunts unhappily and hits him back and Sam lets out a harsh bark as it jostles his chest. Dean is awake instantly.

“Sammy! Sammy, holy shit I’m sorry what the fuck were you thinking?”

He was thinking that he was asleep. He was thinking that he was dreaming something about a hallway and a…body maybe? Something pulsing. Everything is muddled in his head and struggling to make some kind of sense.

Dean is checking him over and looking at every angle of him. And then Dean is pulling him in gently for a hug. And Sam takes a long moment to consider that before he hugs back as best he can. His brother doesn’t seem to mind the weak, one-armed response.

“Calm down.”

He huffs a breath against the side of Sam’s head. “Bitch.”

“Jerk.”

Dean bursts into laughter, and then takes a deep breath that Sam can feel.

Before making a loud and pantomimed gagging noise.

“Ok, Sammy. We gotta give you a better sponge bath.”

Sam feels his entire face screwing up into a look that he knows amuses Dean and that amusement only makes Sam crazier.

“You are not giving me a sponge bath.”

“I think I am.”

And then Dean is gone and Sam has just enough time to think about how ridiculous this is about to become. For half a second he thinks about putting his foot down, and then he remembers that he’s on his back in a bed and that he can’t get up.

Not without help anyway.

Dean comes back in with the little plastic container and a washcloth, and Sam weighs the possibility of hitting his brother. How much it’ll hurt him, how much it’ll cost him, and what it will be worth. Dean settles down on the bed and looks around briefly before hooking the bed tray and pulling it over.

“Dean. Come on.”

“Sammy. Come on.”

Dean helps him get propped up, and Sam lets him pull the hospital gown apart and off. His chest is a mess, bandages and bruises and ugliness everywhere. Dean stares at it for a long moment and all the levity of the situation is gone instantly.

Sam wishes it would come back.

“I really wish you hadn’t done this.”

And what should he say to that? There’s nothing. Nothing at all. So Sam stays quiet and watches Dean’s hands tremble only slightly as they dip the cloth and then come back. He moves with slow precision- this is not the first bath Dean has given Sam- and he wipes carefully along and around wounds. He makes sure to get under the arms, along the sides, and then slides behind Sam to get his back.

It feels good, despite Sam’s protests, but he hates how serious and unhappy Dean is in this moment. How downtrodden.

Eventually his upper half is clean and then Dean moves down to his feet. He starts there, one hand holding Sam’s calf and the other moving the cloth between toes, along the sensitive arch, and then up to meet Dean’s other set of fingers. And Sam watches the way Dean does it, reverent almost, with a sense of embarrassment he hasn’t had in years. It’s not like Dean’s never seen him like this, it’s that Sam has never seen _Dean_ see him like this. He’s never watched Dean during these moments.

Usually he spends what he likes to consider Dean’s uber crazy older brother moments bitching or snarking his way out of the feeling that he is Dean’s big old stupid burden. But right now he doesn’t feel like a burden, and he can’t even say why. Right now he feels like Dean is looking at someone that Sam doesn’t even know. Everything is done as if there’s something precious in his hands that almost left him.

It’s stupid. Sam keeps reminding himself that it is stupid, because he’s been hurt before, because he’s _left_ Dean before and there’s never been a time when their relationship didn’t include one of them broken it seems. Certainly not since Dean showed up at Stanford to collect him.

Dean starts humming, something Sam vaguely thinks is either the Beatles or the Monkees, and then his brother is up to his thighs and moving painfully slow again as he works around the chunk of bandages that swathe Sam’s second puncture wound.

Sam imagines what Dean must have looked like as he dialed 911 all panic and fury as he looks at Sam hurt again and unable to take it back. Sam breaking everything Dean gives a shit about with the same casual thoughtlessness he always has. He imagines Dean trying to tell the dispatcher, in a voice that is both calm and insane at the same time, where they are and how Sam looks.

Judging if it would be faster and safer to take Sam himself. Wondering how much blood Baby’s interior can soak up before she’s haunted by something worse than their-

But he doesn’t remember that. Granted, his memory of the night of the hunt is fractured but it’s not gone. He can remember trying to be logical with Dean as the paramedics tried to stabilize him. He can remember the look on Dean’s face. He can remember, although he can’t place the timing of it, Dean with dried blood taking the place of jizz in a recreation of that stupid comedy movie moment.

All of that comes through the haze, but he can’t remember Dean calling the ambulance.

The moment slips from him when Dean’s fingers brush the skin at the juncture of his thigh and his ass. Dean is looking to the side, not all the way but just enough to offer Sam a little modesty, and Sam doesn’t know why he stares at his brother as if Dean will turn and lock eyes with him in that moment.

As if, at this particular point in their relationship, that sort of intensity wouldn’t be absolutely weird and inappropriate.

As if they’ve ever been appropriate.

Dean hooks one arm under his hips, and then is lifting him up and pressing him close while he cleans parts of Sam that Dean hasn’t touched in way too long. They stay silent for this part, neither one making eye contact although Sam is trying so hard he’s amazed Dean isn’t lighting on fire.

It’s over before Sam can figure out how he wants Dean to react. Over and then Dean is taking his gown away.

“Hey. Hey, I need that.”

Dean hums that tune, continued from before he went oddly silent, and he digs in his bag and comes out with soft looking pajama pants and a shirt. Sam’s mouth waters.

“Do you? I can get the gown back.”

“Fuck you.”

Dean laughs, eyes getting into it as much as his mouth does, and then he helps Sam to get dressed. It feels so fucking good to have pants and a shirt again. Sam acts impulsively, catching Dean’s hand and squeezing his fingers tight in gratitude he can’t verbalize. Dean seems to get it.

“Ok, Sammy, one last bit.” Dean gets the wheelchair and comes back, parking it next to the bed and setting the brake before helping Sam to transition into it. “You better be grateful because the apothecary guy was really judgey about this.”

Sam can’t even begin to guess what that means, but Dean rolls him into the bathroom and then parks the chair again and starts the sink up.

He sees what’s in Dean’s hands then. Sees it and can’t believe it for a moment.

Dean laughs, no eyes included this time just nerves, and then his brother props him up just a little bit in the wheelchair seat and tilts him back so that he can get Sam’s hair into the stream.

It hurts fucking terribly to lean that way, even with Dean tilting the chair and getting him high up, but it feels so good to have water in his hair. When the shampoo hits, smelling minty and bright, Sam closes his eyes and moans. He’s not even vaguely ashamed.

And his brother is laughing, but in a gentle way that makes Sam happy to be a part of it. The shampooing goes semi-smoothly, the conditioner even more so. When it’s done and Dean gets him back upright Sam breathes a sigh of relief with a double meaning.

Dean towel dries his hair, hands soft and steady, and then Dean rolls him back into the room.

“You wanna go on a trip, Sammy? You’re looking good, we can go pick up a double date with the nurses.”

Sam thinks about it for a second, aching so bad he just wants to hit the morphine button until he passes out, and then nods. His brother whoops and then starts a slow trek out into the hall and along the hospital floor.

Pain makes it hard for Sam to focus, and he realizes that’s been true of every trip he’s had outside of his room. He tries, but the rooms and the people sort of blur past him as he focuses on not showing Dean how much this is costing him. He’s grateful for the bath. He’s grateful for the pajamas.

He’s grateful for Dean.

It takes what seems forever, but they make a single stop at Baby where Dean has Sam center himself again and then they are headed back for the room. People Sam doesn’t seem to know talk around them, some directly to them, and Dean interacts with all of them easily. Like an old friend. Like a part of it.

Something deep in Sam is disturbed in a way he isn’t prepared for.

When Sam has fallen asleep Dean lays beside him, awake and unsure of what to do with all the energy he’s built up in the last hour. He pays attention to the sounds of the hospital, to the wheezy little whistle that’s been added to Sam’s breath since the hunt, to the sound of the monitors and the time ticking past.

How many nights has he spent in hospitals? How many nights has he spent wondering what’s going to happen to the person in the bed and if it was his fault?

What he does know is that Sam is safe for right now. Safe and alive. And deeply asleep.

He runs his fingers through Sam’s hair, which is still a little damp from the wash but a thousand times better than it was before. There’s something just…wrong about Sam’s hair not being at peak girliness. Being limp and oily as if it hadn’t been loved in years.

Maybe he makes jokes about it, but deep-down Dean has always loved Sam’s hair and how his brother takes care of it. He’s always loved the part of Sam that keeps things precise and neat like that. There were times when Dean could barely be bothered to get all the blood off before going to bed, but not Sam.

Never Sam.

So now with his brother’s hair clean and soft, with the pajamas on and the lines of his face gentled in sleep that Dean knows is medication-based, his brother is a little more himself. Despite the holes and the muscle damage and the possible permanent brain damage. Which is a little more than Dean is willing or able to really stop and think about.

Maybe he should tell Sam about the Trazodone.

Maybe he should stick a metal fork in a socket and just see how it goes.

When Sam is rested and closer to healed then Dean will talk to his brother about the medication. Sam will be a little betrayed, that’s their approach with each other, but ultimately he knows that Sam Is capable of logic and his brother will let the whole fucking mess go in the interest of finding something Dean is wrong about to even the score.

It’ll be just fine.

Dean finds his fingers circling softly on Sammy’s thigh, moving in widening rings around where he knows the second rebar puncture is and then sliding back toward the epicenter of the damage before circling back out. He thinks of the weight of Sam’s stare on him when he was washing his brother earlier.

He thinks of nothing the fuck at all and that’s good too.

Maybe Dean should try to snag some of Sam’s night night drugs. Maybe he should take a chance at being a little braver and talk to Sam about what’s happening here.

But what _is_ happening here?

Dean knows that he’s not the biggest on introspection. There’s never been a problem he couldn’t at least partially wing a solution to, and often making a plan has ended up worse than just taking things as they come. It’s more his way to react to the moment and then slide on to the next and the next thing.

It’s Sam’s place to dissect and care for them, it’s Sam’s thing to know the inner workings of the problem and the feelings attached to it.

But goddamn Dean isn’t sure that Sam can do that right now and probably one of them needs to.

He thinks of Campbell as Sam utters a little sigh beside him and moves just the tiniest bit, sliding Dean’s questing fingers closer to the juncture of Sam’s thighs and further away from the wound. Thinks of that apple faced smile as his boss listened to him talk, of the way he rearranged the pile.

Added and took away.

Dean’s eyes slide to the side and take in the stack. He wonders what exactly made Campbell change his decisions. If there’s something in there that he thought maybe reflected Sam a little bit better after his story.

His left hand, free of Sam’s thigh, reaches out and snags the third book down on nothing more than a random choice. Dean tells himself that later.

_The Martian Chronicles_. Dean remembers watching a bunch of stories by Ray Bradbury when he was younger. An anthology movie about a dude with tattoos that would come to life and tell stories. Dad was hunting…something. He can’t remember what. It didn’t matter because Dean was benched at the time and Sam was there with him still.

It had been a pizza night, rare but Dean had managed to scrape up just enough extra for them to order and he would be damned if they wasted the chance. So there they’d been, the two of them lying in bed, stuffed with pizza, and watching this old B movie with all these science fiction stories.

Sam had known them. Of course he had. And Dean had laughed at him and dug his knuckles into Sam’s soft hair and made joke after joke about Sam’s nerdiness. But, as he always was, Dean has been deeply impressed once again that his little brother just casually knew yet another thing.

There’d been a story. Dean couldn’t remember the name of it but he remembered the feeling. The sight of the married couple pretending everything was fine when the world was ending. Living in the moment of their lives and just sliding along. Their children rushing towards death with no knowledge.

He remembered hating it, and he remembered Sam loving it. Sam laying his head on Dean’s chest and batting his eyelashes and saying, in a voice that only cracked a little, “Wouldn’t you want to spend your last night with me?”

And he remembered telling Sam, “Duh.”

Dean flicks the book open in the dim light of the hospital room, eyes straining just a bit to catch the words, and starts in an Ohio winter that is more familiar than Dean cares to think of.

Sam sees that ankle again. He follows without taking the moment that should be obvious to ask himself, really ask himself, why she would be in the hospital.

Or why he’s capable of following her.

It follows, in dream logic, that it’s just happening and that everything else is happening too. It follows that Sam follows, and that Jess leads.

They reach the hallway, just flashes of her limbs and Sam chasing after her until the dead end arrives. But this time she’s still there. Her back is to the brick wall, and Sam feels a bone deep disgust at the sight of it before that’s overwhelmed by the hunger to be near her again. To capture that time when she was alive and Sam believed that he could be something else. That he could be hers.

He steps into the circle of her arms, feels the warmth and kindness of her wash over him. She burned on the ceiling, but she isn’t burned here. She’s whole, a white nightgown he doesn’t recognize hanging off the slim body that he does.

“Sam.”

The sound of her voice is forgiveness. Sweetness. It is all the things that Jess so often embodied that Sam never could. It’s the pitch of her voice in orgasm, it’s the sound of her laugh late at night when they held hands and talked, it’s the odd little jealousy that crept into her eyes when Sam got drunk on Dean’s birthday and talked about him.

Sometimes, with the soft haze that only time long passed can give, Sam forgets that she was human too. That she had flaws and quirks that weren’t necessarily the best. That didn’t fit him.

But not in this moment. In this moment she is everything he knew and wanted. She is all those little pieces, alive again and holding him. Sam goes to his knees and presses his face against her flat belly. Pulls in the scent of her.

“Jess.”

He could just stay here. He could just stay here in her arms and accept that she’s able to forgive him here. That he could be whole, even if just because she completes him.

“Sam.”

Her voice is thick, concerned, and he wonders at that as he pushes deeper into her hard flesh. As his face scrapes against the warm bricks that make her body up.

“Sam!”

She’s Dean, screaming his name, but she’s also the wall and the hospital and the town. She is all the things that waited for Sam since the moment he left the safety of his family circle. She is the end of the road. She is the last piece falling into place, a game that was set up thousands of years before Sam was ever Sam.

_Zugzwang_.

“SAM!”

Dean dozes briefly, the book resting against his face, and then something moves. Just a little. Something not beside him but below him. Later, when his head is clear, Dean will blame the strange haunting that stories can sometimes have. Another thing he never liked about extracurricular reading.

But right then Dean knows that it’s something else. He hears Sam say it, “Jess,” clear as a bell, and then he opens his eyes and looks over at his pale and still brother. Sam’s eyes are moving but he’s not. He’s not thrashing or screaming or any of the things that Dean has come to associate with Sammy having a nightmare.

“Sam?”

And his voice is wrong. Feminine. Husky but feminine. Or did he not even say it out loud?

Dean looks over at the monitors, the lost sound of what might have just been a dream of someone’s voice in place of the thought of his brother’s name weighing on him. Experience with hospitals is the only reason he catches it. All of Sam’s numbers are low. Not drastically, not killing low, but low. Blood pressure, temperature, respiration, pulse rate. Just a hair off, but Dean feels his whole body go cold and all the hairs stand up.

“Sam.”

This time it’s his voice, but he sounds broken up and terrified. And why wouldn’t he?

At this point it’s simply a miracle that Dean hasn’t gone insane.

“SAM!”

His brother is asleep, stubbornly asleep, not twitching or moving at all. Dean hits the nurse button and when the woman responds he practically screams at her that Sam is non-responsive.

Medical professionals come running in moments later. Dean is out of the bed and out of their way. The nurse checks leads and vitals manually, while the doctor looks Sam over. He’s not one that Dean recognizes.

Time ticks by, too slowly, too slowly, and then the nurse steps back and the doctor gives Dean the kind of look that can only earn you a punch.

“Mr. Winchester. Sam is sleeping. That could account for a number of minimal dips in vitals. On top of that he seems to be resting quite comfortably, not non-responsive.”

“He’s non-responsive. I was shouting in his face.”

The doctor lifts an eyebrow, and then he picks up Sam’s chart and holds it out to Dean.

_A motherfucking chart_. Somehow Dean never noticed it there, no longer accustomed to looking for them in the digital age.

“You requested Dr. Jorgenson put Sam on Trazodone to help with his night terrors. That was done. Your brother is deeply sedated, he wouldn’t wake up short of a hardcore shock. But he’s very much responsive.”

Something about the way the man says it, which is free of judgement for Dean’s decision and laden with it for his overreaction, floods Dean with guilt.

“If he was having a nightmare, like a blowout one, would we know?”

The doctor blinks, surprised, and the nurse gives the man a side eyed look before slipping out of the room.

“There are ways to know, but by observation only? Probably not.”

“We need to stop giving him the sleeping medication.”

He doesn’t even know where the words come from. He’s thinking a thousand steps behind, to all the other little bits of good he tried to do for Sam that backfired, but his mouth is focused on the present.

“I’d suggest you speak to Dr. Jorgenson about that in the morning. He’s been handling all of your partner’s long-term care.”

“So, you don’t have to do shit for him is what you’re saying.”

The doctor’s face curls up, distaste obvious.

“No sir, I am saying that long-term decisions like that are better made by someone familiar with the patient. And the dose was given to him hours ago, it’s too late for me to do anything about that.”

Dean turns his back on the doctor, linking fingers with Sam, and waits until the asshole leaves.

It’s the only way not to hit him.


	5. Chapter 5

“Trip no further pretty sweeting. 

Journeys end in lovers' meeting, 

Every wise man's son doth know.” 

-William Shakespeare, _Twelfth Night_

Sam wakes up tired. He doesn’t know why.

The sun is up and Dean is sleeping in the chair, looking even more tired than Sam. He can’t remember Dean leaving the bed, or figure out why his brother would do such a thing.

When the door swings open Sam is too lethargic to jump, but he does swivel his eyes and focus on Jorgenson as the doctor bustles into the room at high speed and checks his chart before moving to his IVs and his bandages.

Sam waits for him to finish, the doctor failing to make eye contact in a way that is unusual all by itself. Jorgenson is typically aggressively friendly.

“What?”

The doctor finishes writing down his updates, then glances once towards Dean before looking back at Sam.

“Your partner really upset the doctor on staff last night.”

Sam licks his lips, thinks about that for a second, and then rethinks.

“Partner?”

“I’m sorry I just…don’t know how serious it is. Boyfriend? Husband?”

There are no words for what goes through Sam’s head at that moment. Panic, terror actually that spikes on the monitor, but also a chilling sense of rightness that Sam can’t put his finger on.

“Boyfriend.”

Jorgenson nods while keeping eye contact with Sam. Whatever has gone wrong here, and it is certainly _going wrong_ , not just wrong in general, Sam can tell from that look his doctor does not remember being told that he and Dean were brothers.

“Well, either way, with your… particularly delicate insurance situation it would be better if he didn’t make enemies. Would you tell him that?”

“Tell him what?”

Jorgenson looks over his shoulder, surprised, and Dean is standing there. He moves past the doctor and drops a kiss on Sam’s head that leaves him utterly fucking flabbergasted.

“I was just…I got a call about last night. About your behavior. And I was discussing with Sam that it’s not a great idea to make enemies around here. It’s a small town, and word gets around. Your boyfriend needed the sleep.”

Dean looks almost ashamed, his head tilting down for a second and a rustling noise as his foot sweeps across the floor. And then his brother is looking back up, eyes locked with Jorgenson’s.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have overreacted.”

Jorgenson smiles brightly, one hand ruffling his own hair before he nods at Dean, then Sam, and then leaves the room.

“What?”

“What what?” Dean grins, moving into the bed with Sam. His brother looks younger somehow. Carefree.

And Sam doesn’t know what to do. The smile on Dean’s face is probably as delicate and soft as a soap bubble. They always seem to be. He doesn’t want to ask because he wants it to stay. He wants this feeling to stay.

But also, because he is terrified of what the response will be.

“Needed my sleep?”

“You’re getting wordier by the day, you know. You’ll be bitching me out before Jack has you walking.”

Sam blinks, blinks again, and then tilts his head.

“Jack?”

“Your physical therapist? The sadist you hate so much?”

Sam shakes his head, swallows hard.

“No. She’s named Gretta. Older lady. Stony faced.”

Dean’s face takes on a touch of concern, and he leans forward and captures Sam’s chin. Studies his eyes for too long before releasing.

“Your memory is spotty again. Gretta left after the first couple days Sammy. Moved back home with her family.”

Sam files it away. He can’t argue right now. He’s too tired, and there’s too much wrong. He simply needs to remember all the things that he can later use to underline how very wrong this all is.

“Work today?”

“Yeah. Campbell and I are sorting the historical section again.”

“Why do you keep doing it?”

Dean stops grinning for a second, something flitting across his face.

“Maybe he doesn’t remember that we keep doing it. Shit, I thought it was funny but it might be dementia.”

“Maybe he’s fucking with you.”

Now his brother’s face is bitter.

“He’s not.”

“Sure.”

Dean rolls his eyes, and then leans into Sam and kisses him. And Sam? Doesn’t know what to say. Is it taking advantage if he keeps quiet to keep the peace? To avoid a fight he can’t have with a brother who is obviously not in his right mind?

He hopes not.

Because if he’s logical he can tell himself that arguing now will end in Dean trusting the state of Sam’s mind less. And if going along with it heals a little wound that he’s carried since he was seventeen?

Win win.

Dean is sorting the books, eyes focused on the spines as Campbell sits in a chair and taps his leg to some instrumental tune he has playing over the speaker system.

“Is your boyfriend enjoying the novels?”

“I can’t tell. He reads them when I’m gone and when I come back he’s too busy being crazy.”

Campbell lifts an eyebrow, apple face wrinkling just a little extra in disapproval.

“… injured. Too busy being injured.”

His boss says nothing, face staying in position. It’s a look Dean is familiar with.

“He has a head injury, and it’s really affecting him. He keeps forgetting things, and he’s paranoid. It’s not that I think he’s crazy it’s that he’s sick and I can’t do anything but watch him struggle. And it’s making me crazy.”

“What is he paranoid about? Here in such a calm village.”

Dean frowns, there’s something in Campbell’s tone that he can’t quite place. Something that instantly bothers him.

“Right? That’s what I said.”

“After all, nothing ever happens here. It is simply quiet, calm, and gentle all the time.”

Dean huffs a breath. This is like learning from Dad again. Sarcasm so heavy and thick that he can’t even begin to unravel what he’s done wrong he just knows he never wants to do it again.

“You suggesting that Sammy’s right and this place is secretly dangerous?”

Campbell wipes his mouth with a handkerchief, and then pushes himself up slowly and makes his way towards the back room.

“No. But I am suggesting that you should be more sympathetic.”

He doesn’t even get a chance to make a witty comeback, because Campbell shuts the door to the back room on him.

Which leaves him to consider what Campbell said while he’s sorting the historical books for what feels like the thousandth time.

Campbell, as much as Dean hates to admit it, is not fucking wrong. Sammy is vulnerable right now. He’s hurt, he’s not mobile, and he’s confused. It’s Dean’s job as his big brother to take care of him.

_As his boyfriend_.

Dean stops for a second, hand hovering over the shelf and gripping the Churchill biography a little tighter. They can be that here. For the first time since that one bad weekend while Sam was still a kid they can be whatever the fuck they want. There are no hunters here, no hunt to bring them. No one that knows the Winchester brothers or how deep the twist in them really goes.

He makes ok money here, and if Sam was doing something they could make even better. Get a little rental, something reasonable, eat at the diner and buy cough medicine at the fancy pharmacy. Any number of doors are open to them here.

And could Dean do it? Maybe.

_Haven’t you paid enough, Dean?_

And yeah. He has. He has paid enough. He has paid enough to the world, and it’s never given him a fucking thing back. So maybe it’s time to let the next generation of hunters take over and for him and Sam to move on into retirement. Sure, they’re young, but it could work. 

They haven’t finished off what took mom, but that could still come. Dean could take little vacations, Sam could research, they could be more targeted. Actually plan something out instead of just running around like crazy looking for Azazel. Be on the offensive instead of the defensive. 

Campbell comes tottering back out, one hand gripping his cane and the other leading himself along the wall.

“I think we’re done for the day. I’ll make sure you get paid for a whole shift. I know some blackmail material on the payroll person.”

Dean rolls his eyes, but he does huff a laugh. A moment later he sees how pale Campbell looks.

“Can I help you out here? I don’t want you falling down.”

“That would be nice. My apartment is right upstairs.”

Dean feels his eyebrow lift, imagining Campbell climbing up a set of stairs every day doesn’t seem like the safest of activities. He holds out one arm and the old man takes it before they start walking.

The stairs are rickety, but there’s a power lift that Dean helps Campbell get into and then he follows the chair up slowly until they reach the top. There’s no transitional hallway, it’s just stairs into a warm and cozy living room filled with pictures and knickknacks.

Campbell accepts his help all the way to an old and overstuffed couch, and then waves at the kitchen and coughs once into his other hand.

“Are you familiar at all with tea brewing?”

Dean nods, heading for the kitchen and following directions to find the kettle and the tea bags and cups. He sets the water to boil and then starts looking around, because that’s who he is and what he does.

For a few minutes of staring at model ships, tiny figurines, old photos in muted colors and black and white, and a surprising number of train pictures Dean can’t figure out what’s bothering him. None of this is super out of place in the apartment of an ancient bachelor.

Except, and it occurs to Dean as the whistle goes off and he turns to catch Campbell staring at him, there are no books. No books anywhere in the living room that is very much lived in.

Which might make sense, there’s a whole shop of them downstairs, but there’s nothing that Campbell is currently reading laying around and no beloved and treasured novels not for sale. Nothing up here at all.

He takes the kettle off the stove and pours the hot water into a cup before dropping the bag in and carrying the whole thing over to his boss. Campbell gestures at the other side of the couch and he takes it. There’s a huge framed photo of two men on the wall, black and white, standing in front of an ancient train with their arms around each other and big smiles on their faces.

Campbell is looking at it as he moves his tea bag around.

“My brother.”

Dean blinks, once slowly as he takes that in and then again as he realizes that the tall and buff guy on the left is his little apple-faced employer.

“Wow. How old is that?”

Campbell laughs, taking the bag out of the tea and then blowing once before sipping.

“That photo was taken when I was twenty-five, and my brother was twenty-three. We’re standing next to the Texas Chief, a passenger rail car. We were both a bit train obsessed as boys.”

“Did you guys ride it, or just take a picture of it?”

“We rode it. Incredible dining car. Hal, my brother, kept getting yelled at by the conductor for sticking his head out of windows. Could have lost it if he’d hit something.”

“Must have been incredible back then.”

Campbell takes another sip, staring at the photo with the same intensity he usually gives to new book shipments.

“We rode a lot of trains, some legally and some not. We traveled all over the country, picking up work where we stopped and breezing in and out of towns. We were determined to see every state, every major station, every major city. And then eventually we did.”

“What happened after that? You settled down to open a bookshop?”

Campbell’s mouth purses thoughtfully, and then he takes a long sip before putting the cup down.

“No, he opened this bookshop. I worked at the pharmacy back then. But we did settle down here. He had an accident on a train and this was the location they took us to treat his broken leg.”

“When was this?”

Campbell tilts his head, taps his chin once as he considers.

“A long time ago. Possibly longer than I think.”

“Is that why I got the job?”

His boss smiles, something bitter and complicated in the look as he turns away from the picture and fully to Dean.

“No. That is not why you got the job. Although, I suppose, it may have gone towards why I don’t mind how very terribly you sort my historical section.”

“Hey, I think I do a great job considering you can’t pick a system you want to use.”

Campbell relaxes back into the couch a bit. His eyes are starting to droop, and Dean doesn’t expect that he’ll be awake much longer.

“One of the benefits of being my age is that indecision no longer scares you.”

“I noticed. You want the lights off?”

When Dean stands up his boss turns his body so he’s taking up the couch. He knocks his shoes off and smiles, much more honest than the one from a moment earlier.

“Yes, please. Thank you, Dean. Don’t forget to lock up.”

“Of course. See you tomorrow.”

He drapes a throw over Campbell, who is already out. Stops just a moment at the top of the stairs to take in all the nostalgia, and then heads down quietly.

The walk back to the hospital is dotted by familiar faces. Dean nods and waves as is appropriate, his feet taking him forward while his brain skips back and forth. Landing on the details of Campbell’s home, of his history, of the connections between himself and Sam.

On the way he keeps resorting the historical section.

Keeps resorting and resorting it.

_Indecision no longer scares you_.

Dean wonders about that. And then the church bells ring, and Dean realizes that if he wants to get there in time to see Sam’s session with Jack he has to really move.

So, he does. Because Dean has been many things in his life, but indecisive has never been one of them.

Sam hates Jack. The same way he hates Jorgenson. The same way he hated Gretta when she was his physical therapist.

_Fucking yesterday_.

But if everybody is gonna insist that he’s insane for claiming they’re wrong then Sam will bide his time. Keep his eyes open.

Jack has a grip on the belt around Sam’s waist, the one that makes sure he isn’t putting all of his weight on his bad leg as he holds onto the hand rails and takes his first step. It burns, everything hurts, the screaming agony of his thigh is nothing compared to how the movement and motion pulls on his chest. It feels like the hole that is closing up has stored gasoline and moving has lit it on fucking fire.

But Sam needs to do this. Needs to be able to run when running will be appropriate.

His physical therapist lets out a victorious cry, and Sam jerks a little and looks up through the sweat pouring down his face to see Dean. His brother is grinning, leaning on the rail at the end of the short walk like it’s the wall of a bar.

“Hey Sammy.”

It’s physically impossible for Sam to talk right now. His hands shift a little on the bars, and Dean’s smile turns hopeful and proud instead of cheeky. His mouth, on the other hand, does not get with the program.

“Come on, lazy bones. You can do this.”

His brother holds out both arms, like Sam is some kind of fucking baby taking his first steps, and Jack is just over the moon at this.

“Let’s get you to your boyfriend, what do you say Sam?”

He says _shut the fuck up_. He says _he was my brother yesterday_. He says _I know you’re fucking wrong_.

But Dean is right there. The goal.

As per usual.

Sam takes another step, and then another, pushing down on the overwhelming urge to simply give in to the pain and exhaustion that is there despite him barely handling any of his own weight or motion. Dean’s arms are still out, and he thinks that maybe his brother is having some kind of ridiculously inappropriate moment here that Sam is not having.

And then, in the crack of the doorway behind Dean, he sees a face. A grizzled one, hair just starting to go salt and pepper but skin wrinkled and creased from worrying and hating. A strong chin, a curved mouth, and calloused hands. One of those hands lifts, just for a moment, as if he’s going to wave but changes his mind.

Dad slips out of view before Sam can even think to do anything. He takes another step, his breath ratcheting up, his arms shaking wildly as his hands death grip the bars.

“Come on Sammy, come on, that’s it.”

Dean isn’t reading him right. They are out of sync. They are finally fucking together and they are out of fucking sync.

Sam’s brain screams, screams, screams for Dean to understand but his brother just stays there with this stupid grin and his arms out as Sam stagger steps towards him with his heart jack-hammering its way out of the thin skin covering it and his lungs bursting into flames.

He reaches Dean, a ball of sweat and fear, and Dean seems to pick up on the problem just as Sam collapses against him. The last thing he hears is Jack shouting his name as the room goes out of focus, as Dean’s cold hands take his arms, as his first steps end in collapse.

Sam is sleeping. His head is on Dean’s chest, and he’s barely moving in his sleep. It’s not comfortable, but not because of how heavy the mass of his brother is.

Usually, and Dean has extensive experience on this front, Sam moves in his sleep. Usually he twitches, mutters, rolls, clings. Just about anything. But right now he is just sleeping, breathing into Dean’s chest, and his vitals are low again. Jorgenson has already been and gone, claiming again that Sam’s readout isn’t bad and that this is all part of the healing process.

Dean doesn’t believe it. He can practically feel the gears in his head grinding, slow and fine, trying to find the final answer to what exactly it is that he’s concerned about at the moment. Either his instincts are wrong, Jorgenson is bad at his job, or he’s lying. And the last one…well it doesn’t make any sense at all that Dean would have it on his list. Because Jorgenson is a decent guy, more than decent honestly, and he’s given them a huge break by letting them stay and not pushing on the legality of their payments.

And maybe Dean is wrong. Hell, Sam could probably list every time Dean has been wrong in his entire life and the list would take the rest of it to go over, but Dean doesn’t think so. He knows his brother’s heartbeat. He knows _his brother_.

Something else is wrong, and everybody seems to be missing it. And Dean doesn’t know what to do about that. Sam’s wounds are closing, healing, he’s taking his first steps, but he’s not stable enough to leave. He’s not strong enough to start traveling again.

The chances of finding another hospital that will ignore their shady insurance and give Sam all the help he needs are so slim Dean can’t chance it. So, he just needs to figure out which of the three options are correct.

Bradbury is open in his free hand, the other is buried in Sam’s hair and moving mechanically to rub his brother’s scalp. It helps Sam sleep peacefully, it helps Dean to think, and it keeps him moving without disrupting the careful balance they have.

His fingers keep moving, moving, and then he hears it. Outside the window, something scraping maybe, something dragging against the glass. Dean keeps his eyes on the book. He keeps his brain moving over possibilities.

Sam’s mind isn’t working correctly. Sam was dead. Sam was dead and his brain was choked. Sam had several minutes in that darkness with no oxygen and _what is that fucking noise_.

He looks over to the window. There’s a tree branch. It skids with every breeze, screeching its way across the glass. Dean thinks of horror movies, he thinks of the cold vacuum of space, he thinks of traveling to Mars.

He wonders how lonely that is.

The door opens, and Dean looks up to see Jorgenson. The doctor should be gone, off for the day, but here he stands with Sam’s chart in his hands and a smile on his face.

“Dean. Hey. Can you come with me? I want to discuss something with you.”

It takes a little while to extricate himself from Sam, but once he’s up all that nervous energy intensifies. The window is so close. _It’s looking at him_.

He follows Jorgenson out into the hallway.

“I know that you’re worried about your boyfriend. To be honest, I’m starting to worry a little too.”

Dean’s heartbeat ratchets down. Finally, here is what he needed. Jorgenson is going to start looking. He’s not lying. It’s not a plot.

“Ok. So, what’s the concern, and what’s the plan?”

They’re wandering through the hospital, turning corner after corner, and Dean feels like he’s lost on familiar ground. It’s not a feeling he’s used to.

“I think that Sam’s paranoia is wreaking havoc on the rest of his system. Pain, trauma, and painkillers are all conspiring against him to keep his brain working against him. And all of that is bad, but I think that you’re suffering too, Dean. I think that you’re experiencing PTSD from seeing Sam get injured and from watching him suffer. I think that your hypervigilance is infecting Sam and making him worse.”

Dean feels his mouth pursing. Because yeah, ok, he has a habit of making Sam worse, but he doesn’t think that he’s doing that right now. And it still doesn’t explain Sam’s vitals.

They come to a full stop at a dead end in the hospital, a blank brick wall with no doors near it. Dean stops with Jorgenson, and turns to face the doctor head on.

“This sounds like bullshit.”

Jorgenson puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s friendly, familiar, and it should be relaxing but for some reason it’s not.

“Dean, we want you to be happy here. We want you relaxed. If you’re relaxed then Sam will be relaxed.”

Sam was dead. Sam was dead on the table. Sam was dead on the table and Dean was in the hallway. And that’s certainly stressful, he knows that it’s stressful, but it’s not their first rodeo either.

It occurs to Dean, in that moment, as he’s looking at Jorgenson’s open and honest face, that sometimes when you die there’s someone to talk to. Someone that might say something fucking obscure, something that would travel with you back all garbled. Dean’s experienced it once after all.

“Goddamn it, Dean. I really thought it wouldn’t come to this.”

Jorgenson’s face is hassled, tired, not at all the friendly one that Dean has come to know. And in his very core he understands this was the true face all along. This was the face that Sam saw, that Dean felt but couldn’t see. He starts to reel backwards, to give himself space to fight if fighting is necessary, but when his head turns to the left he sees her and it’s all over.

Dean has just long enough to hear himself telling Sam nothing is gonna hurt him while Dean is around. And then his feet are moving, and his arms are out. He goes to his knees, and presses his face against the cold brick midsection of her. Feels her arms wrap around him and squeeze comfortingly.

His mother’s nightgown brushes his face, and he falls asleep in the safety of her hold. 


	6. Chapter 6

“Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.”   
― **Barbara Kingsolver,**[ **The Poisonwood Bible**](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/810663)

Sam wakes up curled against Dean. His brother is sleeping peacefully, eyelids twitching and fingers curling slow and warm against Sam’s skin. The Bradbury collection is on Dean’s leg. He’s stopped on the first page of “The Third Expedition”. Sam doesn’t recognize the name, but he marks the page and puts it with the other books on the tray.

His brother’s fingers quest up a little further, pushing his shirt out of the way and stroking along his ribs. It’s been a long time since they were able to do this. Not that they haven’t slept side by side, or scrunched together into a small space in the last year. Even with the bench seat reclined sleeping in the Impala always ends in being tangled up in each other.

But not like this. Slow touches, skin to skin contact, that’s been off the menu since Sam was seventeen.

Three months, dad was gone for three months and everything that had built between them after Sam’s first growth spurt came to a head. A fistfight that became kissing that became two teenage hands jerking furiously and sweat and teeth and blood in the rush of-

Sam blinks, hazily, unsure of why his mind has drifted so far off center. Maybe it’s the stroking. Maybe it’s soothing. But he’s not sure.

He reaches for _Burnt Offerings_ and opens it back up to his stopping point. Whatever sliver of intuition he got when he picked it up the first time it hasn’t come back. The family is slowly falling apart as the place eats their sanity and their life.

And then Sam blinks again and there’s an old man in the hospital room. Sam is relieved that he doesn’t recognize him. There’s an ornate cane in one hand, and his face is pulled into a tired and pained expression that Sam thinks probably resembles his own current look.

“Can I help you?”

The old man takes several steps forward, and then slowly lowers himself into the chair that Dean used to live in.

“No, but I can help you. And I have a very short time in which to do it.”

Sam feels his heart speed up a little, but he doesn’t let it stop what feels like his first chance at a clear answer.

“How?”

The old man pulls a wrinkled picture out of his pocket. He holds it out and Sam just manages to take it. Two young men, tall and strong, stand in front of a train. They’re smiling, arm in arm, and Sam recognizes the look.

A world that includes only them.

“That’s my little brother. Hal, the world’s smartest idiot.”

Despite himself, Sam feels his mouth pull up into a smile. He looks up only to feel it die, the old man is crying silently.

“Hal got injured when we were on the fly. I thought for certain a Bull would show up, but instead it was an ambulance. To be fair, all I could think about or see was Hal’s leg bone sticking out and all that blood. It never occurred to me to wonder how the ambulance knew to arrive there. This hospital looked very different back then, but the rest of the village was basically the same. They gave me a job in the pharmacy, let Hal stay even though we were skint. He got better a little bit more slowly than I think everyone expected. By the time he was up and running the shop near mine was empty, and the town mayor suggested they needed a bookshop and people to run it. And that was what we did.”

The old man stops, wiping his lips with a handkerchief and adjusting his coat. Sam thinks he’s trying to skip some of the story, but isn’t sure what part to skip.

“I should’ve listened to him. Time and again Hal told me there was something wrong. His leg never fully healed, and we had an opportunity here. All my wanderlust went away. It seemed so natural to settle down together, to stay in such a safe little place. We belonged here, I believed that. And if my sensitive little brother was getting sicker, quieter, more desperate? Well, it would get better. He would get over the trauma of it. We survived the war, we survived the travel, why wouldn’t we survive this?”

Sam pushes himself up, it’s painful but possible, and he doesn’t miss how Dean barely stirs.

“Sensitive?”

The old man grins, hand wiping at his mouth again.

“You’re just as sharp as I hoped you’d be. Hal always had a sense of people. To a point that would often be disturbing. When we got here I think that a little of what Hal had got shared around. Everybody drinks from the same well in a village, you know. And since you arrived I’ve been seeing Hal here and there. I think you know what I mean. I think your brother does too.”

Sam’s surprise must show. He works to keep himself quiet.

“Yes, I remember what you were when you came. Everybody does. But the well tells you what to say and you say it. Otherwise the water turns poisonous. I don’t know how it finds people like you and Hal, I don’t know how it feeds on you, but I know it ate Hal for years. And without knowing it so did I.”

“When did you know?”

“For sure? When I saw him the first time after you arrived. But I had my suspicions when he passed. Hal was too strong, too young, and I had become complacent. Once upon a time I cared about being alive, and then somehow I only cared about living.”

Sam studies the picture for a long moment before things start to click.

“How old were you in this?”

The old man smiles again.

“ _Sharp_. I was in my late thirties. Hal was not far behind.”

He doesn’t have to do the math. There’s no way this old man should still be mobile. Most likely he shouldn’t still be around.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

The old man spreads his hands, a gesture of surrender and acceptance that Sam is only familiar with secondhand.

“Because I broke too many rules. So, the well has replaced me.”

“You’re lying.”

He laughs, a cracked and weathered sound. It takes a moment for him to get up, bones creaking loudly. He moves one step forward, a second, a third, and then places one wrinkled hand on Sam’s. It’s freezing cold.

“Yes and no. But seeing Hal was a step too far for me I think. Knowing and _knowing_ are different things, don’t you think Sam Winchester?”

Sam nods, helplessly.

“Could you leave?”

“I am leaving. And I hope that soon you’ll be doing the same thing. Although through a different door.”

“Where is the well?”

The old man is starting to tremble, his hand still on Sam’s, cold and dry. Skin is peeling up from his cheeks and chin, sliding off his hand and onto Sam’s bedsheets.

“I don’t know. But I wish you luck Sam. You and your brother. I really liked him.”

And then he collapses in on himself with a sickening noise like dry rotted tree branches snapping. Ashes and dust, decomposed and dry, pour over the floor and onto Sam’s hand, and it’s all he can do not to scream. As he watches them even those little bits evaporate, leaving nothing behind of the old man but the photo Sam is still clutching in his other hand.

Dean wakes up slow. He was dreaming, but he can’t remember about what. His mouth is dry and his eyes feel like they were hot glued shut. When he turns his head to the right Sam is there, reading calmly.

“Hey Sammy, what time is it?”

“I found Captain Black.”

Sam’s voice is calm, collected, and Dean immediately distrusts it.

“Yeah? Where at?”

His brother wiggles the Bradbury book.

“’Mars is Heaven’, also known as ‘The Third Expedition’. You were just about to read it.”

Dean checks the clock and feels his pulse spike.

“Ok, look, I’m dying to talk about this, but I’m late and Campbell was sick yesterday.”

Sam licks his lips, a strange look flitting across his face, and then he nods and smiles.

“Head out. I’m gonna take physical therapy a little slower.”

He feels a warm rush, squeezes Sam’s hand once, drops a kiss on his head, and then runs through the process of getting ready at high speed before rushing out of the hospital. He grabs coffee from the machine at the last second, remembering almost too late that the village has no Starbucks and Phyllis isn’t the fastest server.

Dean’s feet stutter on the sidewalk when he sees the town sheriff standing outside of the bookshop. Windsor has his hat in his hand, and a hangdog expression Dean doesn’t recognize.

Even though he trusts Jorgenson not to turn them in, Dean has gone out of his way to avoid Windsor and Bobbsey. He’s seen the sheriff across the street, briefly in the pharmacy, but never for more than a moment and only once in his direct line of sight.

Windsor has never looked this dour, and Dean is terrified.

“Good morning, Sheriff. How are you today?”

“Morning Mr. Winchester. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Dean braces himself internally, externally working on keeping his face as blank and bland as humanly possible. Windsor shifts his hat in his hands and looks around.

“Mr. Campbell passed away in the night.”

That. Was not what he expected. Dean swallows hard against a surprising level of grief.

“Do you know how it happened?”

But Dean knows. He knows before Windsor tells him.

“Old age. He went peacefully in his sleep if that’s any consolation. He left you a letter, and it may not surprise you that you were named in the Will. I think they’re doing an official reading later this week.”

His eyebrow raises. In any other town Dean would wonder if this little detail was going to bring him more harm than good.

“No, that’s definitely surprising. Why would he name me in the Will?”

“Because he had no one else.”

And Dean feels that swell of grief again. He thinks of Campbell’s brother in the pictures. Of how close they obviously were. Windsor hands the letter over and Dean takes it and then thanks the sheriff and walks away. He picks a park bench to read it on, because he’s not entirely sure he wants Sam to see his face as he goes through it.

Luckily, the letter is short and to the point. Campbell’s handwriting is flowery script, scrawling across the page.

_Dean,_

_I do not know if you will need this, but I am writing it in just in case. My health has been increasingly poor over the last few years. I am grateful to have found such a helpful and energetic assistant. I hope that you have enjoyed your time in the bookshop, as it is now yours. Please enjoy it with your boyfriend. I am sure that this is not what you had planned. Should you find that being the owner of a small bookshop is not to your liking don’t hesitate to hand the responsibility off to someone else and move on to the next thing. What matters most is your and Sam’s happiness._

_Sincerely,_

_Campbell_

Dean comes into the physical therapy room with a face that is so many things it’s almost blank. Sam is laying under the heating blanket, the tens machine sending little shocks through his back and leg.

“Sammy.”

He holds a hand out and his brother takes it. They stay that way for a long time, silent, as Sam wonders if he should let anything about Campbell slip. He’s had time to think. Dean is drinking from whatever well Campbell did for so many years. Whatever it is that’s influencing his brother it could kill him just as easily as it seems to be twisting him.

And Sam can’t let that happen.

So, he has to play along. His only option is to leave Dean behind and find the fucking thing himself. If he can destroy it, he can save his brother. Hopefully whatever it does to people it doesn’t last.

“Sammy. You’re not gonna believe this.”

Sam is face down in a pillow so he can mouth what Dean says next without his brother seeing.

“Campbell died. Middle of the night. And he left the bookshop _to me_.”

He swallows it down and keeps his face hidden.

“Are you ok?”

It’s the right question to ask. If Sam is too complacent the well or whatever the fuck it is will figure out something is wrong. How it doesn’t know Sam is unsure, as it knew to kill Campbell but it didn’t seem to know he was there last night.

“I. Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. But did you hear me? He left his shop to us. Can you believe that?”

_Of course I can._

“Not really. Didn’t you say he had a brother?”

_Hal, the world’s smartest idiot._

“Yeah. But he died a long time ago. I guess I was all that was left. Which is pretty fucking sad on its own.”

“Shut up. You’re all I have left.”

Dean doesn’t seem to have a smart answer for that.

“How are you feeling?”

Sam thinks many things before he answers. None of them are pleasant.

“Hurting.”

“You need meds?”

“No. I feel hazy enough already.”

Dean is silent in response. When Jack comes back in and unhooks Sam before helping him into the wheelchair Sam is grateful that the traitorous fuck doesn’t mention that Sam tried walking again. It probably doesn’t occur to Jack that Dean didn’t know that.

Because the thing doesn’t care if Sam can walk. It just doesn’t want him to run.

His brother takes over control of the wheelchair and pushes him outside the hospital. Sam takes deep breaths of the clean air outside and looks around at all the lush greenery and sunshine.

“Sam, what do you think about staying? Like, for good? I mean, it’s a fucking long shot that it would work, but we have a place and we can be together and you can read all the fucking books you want.”

He thinks of the family in _Burnt Offerings_. He thinks of Captain Black letting himself die because his dead loved ones were waiting for him.

“What about hunting Dean? What about everything else we do?”

“I think we’ve done enough. Don’t you think we’ve fucking done enough at this point?”

Yes, but Dean doesn’t really think that. Not his Dean. Not the one who’s clear headed and fully awake.

“I dunno Dean. It seems risky as hell. What happens if they start to get suspicious?”

“We take off, same as we always have before. But Sam. You need the time. You need the stability and the safety. You’re hurt and you need somewhere to heal.”

“I do like books.”

“You’re fucking right you like books.”

“And it’s quiet at least.”

“…it is.”

Sam can feel Dean’s suspicion building with every inch he gives.

“We can try it.”

“Really? Sam, you ok?”

Sam turns his face to focus on Dean. His brother’s eyes are narrowed, sharp, and Sam knows why. But he’s also hoping that putting just a little distance in between himself and the hospital might give him time. Not being constantly overwhelmed by the close proximity of what he is sure is the epicenter of the well’s influence might allow him to stop collapsing into sleep at night and flying into a panic at the slightest hint of off.

Or maybe knowing for certain something is going on will remove that last part.

“Yeah. I just want to get out of this fucking hospital.”

Dean’s mouth curves into a huge grin and he reaches out and takes Sam’s hand.

“Ok. Well let me talk to Jorgenson. You’re off everything but the monitors, and I bet with the bookstore being so close it would be fine to just move you in.”

Sam squeezes Dean’s hand gently and doesn’t try to hide his relieved sigh.

“I don’t understand the argument.”

Jorgenson is looking at a chart, his eyes focused on the writing instead of Dean’s face.

“I’m nervous about him leaving the hospital. I think that the anti-psychotics we’ve been slipping him are important, and I don’t think you’ll be able to make him take those if he’s not getting them intravenously.”

Dean dry scrubs his face and considers that for a moment. Jorgenson is not necessarily wrong, but he’s not necessarily right either.

“Promising him I can get him out of the hospital and settled into a place is a lot of leverage to get him taking his meds. I just have to…tell him. That we’ve been helping him sleep.”

_Dosing, drugging, betraying him_.

For some reason the little voice in Dean’s head sounds like Campbell.

“And you think that will go over well?”

“I think he wants to escape.”

Jorgenson mulls that over for a moment before nodding his head. He walks away, leaving Dean to go break the news himself. Which, admittedly, is probably better.

He finds Sam doing slow stretches, working on the muscles that were injured in the attack. His brother is trembling a little, but Dean knows better than to mess with the determined face that Sam is making. Instead he takes a seat next to the bed and watches Sam for a little bit.

It’s good to see Sam reclaiming a little bit of the level headedness that he had before. Even better to think of taking Sam back to their new home, getting him comfortable, and not having to worry about leaving him every day in a strange place that only seems to increase his anxiety.

“What?”

Dean blinks, realizing that he’s simply been staring at Sam this entire time. He rubs his eyes for a second before leaning in.

“So, I talked to Jorgenson. And I think that you can get out of here, but there’s something we need to talk about.”

His brother’s face becomes instantly shuttered, and Dean feels a little thread of anxiety he can’t explain.

“What’s that?” Sam’s voice is overly controlled. Dean’s unease grows.

“Well, Jorgenson wants to make sure that you’re taking all of your medication and taking care of yourself if we take you out of the hospital. And you gotta come back for the physical therapy sessions.”

Sam’s eyebrow arches, his face completely calm and unimpressed.

“So, they’re giving us more of the pain medication and then we also need to make sure that there’s no infection, and that if there’s any sign of serious breathing issues cropping back up we take care of that.”

His brother’s mouth purses, and Dean knows that he is running out of time.

“Including the Trazodone that you’re getting at night to make sure you don’t have the night terrors you were having originally.”

And there it is. For just a moment Dean sees the fire flare up, the anger that he’s so used to causing at this point, and then it’s gone and Sam is sitting perfectly still with a face that is simply collected.

“Sammy?”

“When do we get to leave the hospital? Today?”

“Sammy, look, you were screaming and-“

“I get it.”

Dean doesn’t know what to do with this. He stands up, moving over to be closer although getting within Sam’s reach is a stupid idea.

“You do?”

“Yeah. Why would I be surprised? You decided, yet again, that you knew better and ignored my ability to make decisions for myself. You’re gonna tell yourself you don’t feel bad for being a traitorous fuck because it was in my best interests. Why should I bother getting angry and saying anything when the next time you have a chance to violate my free will you’ll just do it again? It’s pointless, and I’m conserving my energy right now. When do we get to leave the hospital?”

Dean bites back his initial anger, and stands up hastily.

“Yeah. Today.”

“Great.”

“ _Great_.”

He leaves to find whoever can give him the release paperwork.


	7. Chapter 7

“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.” ― Arthur Miller

Sam stares out the Impala’s window, watching the village he has only seen from above glide by and wondering. Wondering just how much more fight he could put up if he wasn’t being drugged at night. If he’d have been able to protect himself just a little bit better. How deep inside of him the well has gotten thanks to the drugs.

Dean hasn’t spoken since “great”. Sam lets him have the last word, because once the guilt hits having that will only make it worse.

The bookshop looms, and Sam wonders if Hal had the same feeling when he rode up to it the first time. Or strolled, depending on the period and whether or not Campbell had the money for it.

He adds this to the list of things that Dean would have questioned if his head was clear. _Who called the ambulance, Dean? How did he survive on the money brought in from selling books to such a small village, Dean? Have you ever even seen a book sold there, Dean?_

And come to think of it, will money just show up? Campbell was self-aware, to some extent, but Dean is completely disconnected from logic. How will it trick him into thinking that he’s doing it on his own? That everything is normal?

And what the fuck is it?

_Burnt Offerings_ was some kind of hint. The Bradbury story was another. But while both of them include people being fed on in one manner or another there is no deeper link than that. Campbell called it a well, and that might be accurate but it might also be his interpretation of it.

Whatever it is, it’s in the hospital. And Sam is facing it alone. Even if Dean could be trusted, and he obviously _can’t_ , it’s not safe to reason with him. Sam can still feel the bits of Campbell on the skin of his hand.

Dean wheels him into the shop, and Sam finally gets to see the place his brother has been spending so much time. It’s nice. Super old fashioned, just like described, but comfortable. In any other situation Sam would take the time to really look at the offerings. He’s willing to bet there’s a lot in here that wouldn’t be available in Barnes and Noble, and possibly more than even Amazon would offer.

Maybe he’ll raid the place before they leave.

_Where do the books come from, Dean?_

There’s a lift chair on the stairs. Dean has the decency to look away as he helps Sam into it, and Sam lets him without argument. The thing is relatively quiet, and that lets Sam listen to Dean quietly cursing as he tries to fold the chair up and get it up the stairs behind Sam.

_Why is everything so old-fashioned, Dean?_

At the top of the stairs is a little apartment. There’s no TV, but there is a big couch and a kitchenette. A bachelor pad. Campbell said that he and his brother lived here, and Sam takes note that there are only two doors branching off of the living space and one of them has to be a bathroom. _If there’s only one bedroom why did he tell you there was a room for rent here, Dean?_

Did the town recognize them as boyfriends as well? Or due to the time period was it an entirely different honeypot that they were sucked into?

There are no books up here, but there’s little pieces of Campbell and Hal everywhere. Sam lets Dean help him into the wheelchair and then rolls his way to the door. He can see that Dean _hates_ him moving himself, but fuck him.

One door leads to a bedroom with a big bed and the other to the bathroom he predicted.

_What’s the chance of you ending up with the one man who knows what it’s like to fuck his little brother, Dean?_

He says nothing about the place. He rolls his way to the bed, and then lets Dean help him into it. It’s soft, comfortable. Of course it is.

Dean is finishing up stocking the new shipment that came in on Campbell’s last day while he considers Sam’s reaction.

It was so much worse than he was prepared for. Dean knew that he would be angry, he knew that he would say something that would get under Dean’s skin, but he was unprepared for how disconnected Sam was.

After several hours Dean finally has all the new books up. He stretches slowly and looks at the clock. Sam is gonna need lunch. There’s no avoiding it. He turns the sign to closed and then heads up the narrow stairs into the apartment.

Sam is on the floor, covered in sweat, pulling his injured leg up into a deep stretch that would probably normally be very easy for Sam. And which also really shows off Sam’s ass.

Dean takes a deep breath and walks past his brother into the kitchen, digging in the fridge to put together sandwiches for both of them. Sam’s get extra lettuce, less mayo, more cheese. No one can be a healthy eater around cheese.

He drops two pickles on Sam’s plate, pours water from the Brita pitcher that Campbell left them, and then heads over to put everything on the coffee table. Sam is stretching his uninjured leg now, has the goddamn thing hooked up to his chest, and Dean considers that before biting viciously into his own pickle and chewing until the urge to compliment passes.

Sam pushes himself up with his left arm and starts eating with just as much hatred as Dean is mustering. It’s impressive honestly. And Dean knows that this won’t go anywhere. Sam can outlast him.

“You want help with a bath?”

“You want to go fuck yourself?”

“Witty, Sammy.”

Sam gives him the finger with a trembling arm. Goes back to eating as if Dean isn’t even there. So the cycle continues, and Dean finishes his meal and takes both dishes to the sink to wash before coming back to Sam sitting on the floor.

He could walk away. Sam would appreciate that. But fuck what Sam appreciates. Dean hooks his arms under Sam’s pits and lifts him into the wheelchair.

For his trouble Sam gives him more of the same silent treatment. Which leaves Dean to head back down the stairs and re-open the shop before he starts stocking the new shipment Campbell got in on his last day.

Sam listens to Dean moving things around downstairs again. He thinks of the robotic nature of sleepwalkers as he pushes himself into the bathroom and fills the sink with hot water.

At least that’s one question answered.

It takes time for him to get clean enough to feel better about himself. With Dean’s self-imposed (well-imposed?) schedule it’s not hard to sneak in more activity than his brother knows about. It was much harder to swallow down the pain when Dean came up the stairs and stretch his legs after the five steps he took had him on the floor.

Five steps though is a lot further unassisted than Sam is supposed to be able to take. And every day Dean is going to go down into that shop and Sam is going to add a few steps. Unless the well tries to stop him.

Sam rolls back out, the muscles on the right side of his chest screaming from all the activity. He digs for his laptop and then opens it up on the two-person table to start researching. He has bits and pieces, but not much. He starts by trying the GPS on the laptop to see if Google can tell him where the fuck they are.

The browser informs him his location is not available. He tries it on the phone next, but with no luck. When he can make himself talk to Dean again Sam will ask him what the place is called. Until then he goes more general with the issue.

It’s not a ghost, it’s not a demon, it’s not any of the things they’re used to. There’re thousands of monsters that feed on people, which makes this infinitely harder. It evolves with its meals, and it seems to have a taste for “sensitive” people.

There’s a couple of promising prospects. It could be a deity attached to wells or water that is feeding on tricked worshippers. There’s a list of legends regarding wells that Sam bookmarks for later reading on another day that Dean is working.

He can’t take notes, there’s no way to assure that the thing won’t make Dean read them. He has to try to keep everything in his head, and right now that means absorbing information in bits and pieces instead of huge chunks. When he closes the laptop he mentally goes over the first list of possibilities multiple times to make sure that it sticks before he moves on to the next chore.

Campbell left all sorts of personal items, but if there’s a diary or a journal Sam can’t find it. He can, on the other hand, find pictures. Tons of pictures of Campbell and Hal. With the new information he’s received he can see even more dead giveaways about the two of them. It’s too bad Campbell had no earthly remains here to haunt them. Maybe Dean would pay attention to a ghost.

And that gives him an idea.

Dean takes extra time before he turns the sign to closed again. He figures that if he gives Sam enough of a wait he’ll either burn himself out and be asleep, or be hungry enough he stops arguing to eat. Either way Dean kind of wins.

Kind of, but not by much.

Except what he finds when he gets upstairs is Sam sitting in front of the coffee table with a wealth of pictures spread out in front of him. His brother nods in his direction when Dean says his name, but continues to focus on the spread.

He debates going to look, and then decides instead to start making dinner. He half fills a pot and then starts up the water.

“Sam?”

There’s a little hum from the couch, and Sam’s head dips just briefly before coming back up.

“Sammy?”

Now just silence, and Sam is still actively moving photos around loudly enough for Dean to hear it. Which feels a little targeted.

“So, I got all of the stock put up today. Campbell would have lectured me on the sorting.”

At this, Sam’s head turns just enough to show he’s listening even if he’s not fully looking. Dean dumps the hot dogs into the water and then adds the noodles.

“I think it works though. It’s a little more accessible. He had a weird sorting system.”

“Hal.”

Dean looks up from the pot to see that Sam is now staring directly at him.

“What?”

“Hal. Hal had a weird sorting system.”

There’s a twist in his gut, but Dean doesn’t feel like chasing it. He stirs the noodles and then pulls out the strainer.

“You get that name from the pictures?”

“Nope.” Sam is still sorting, moving, and looking as if there’s nothing odd about this at all. He watches the noodles hit peak and then strains them, fishes out the hot dogs, and starts mixing in the milk and butter before the cheese mixture.

“You want buns or just them cut in?”

“Buns.”

He sorts it all out, brings everything over to the coffee table, and then grabs them both a beer. With the meds Sam probably shouldn’t have one. Dean kind of hopes the thing will be a peace offering.

“What are you looking for?”

Sam takes a bite of the first hot dog, and then points at the first stack.

“I want to make a timeline. I need something to keep me busy.”

Dean leans in and picks up the first stack. It’s all Campbell and Hal when they were young. Every picture is carefully taken in the way older photos had to be. Posed shots on a grand lawn, in fancy rooms, in any number of settings that suggest a much more upscale childhood than Dean would have guessed.

His interest is officially peaked.

“Campbell didn’t strike me as a trust fund baby.”

Sam keeps sorting, dropping one photo into the empty space as he goes. It has Campbell staring at Hal, face full of little boy responsibility and pride. Dean’s hand itches to pick it up, but he doesn’t do that. He can feel Sam preparing to psychoanalyze him.

“It looks like they were really rich as kids. I haven’t figured out the story, but I guess they decided to leave it.”

Dean can literally feel the goddamn thing _staring_ at him.

“Tell me when you figure it out?” Casual. So casual.

“Of course.” Sam goes back to sorting. “It’ll probably take a couple days, but I have time.”

“You do. Although, when you feel up to it, you’re more than welcome to come down into the shop part. You could hang out. Read.”

Sam looks up from the pictures, smiles once, an honest one that Dean likes a lot.

“Sure. I can do that.”

Sam waits three days before he rolls himself to the lift and takes it down. Dean meets him at the base of the stairs with wide and wild eyes.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I want to read.”

Dean’s face is a hundred times bitchier than Sam’s could ever be. But this is a delicate part of his plan and he needs Dean to work with him.

“You couldn’t call down? You couldn’t just wait for help?”

Sam grins, one that he knows will shut Dean up for just a moment, and then unbuckles the belt on the chair lift.

“I thought you needed the adrenaline spike. Go get the wheelchair?”

And Dean does, because he has to, leaving Sam alone in the chair lift to study the store. He eyes all the different sections carefully, looking for one that fits the bill he needs. It’s not a big shop, but it takes him a second since he’s squinting at everything from the back hallway. When he finally spots it, Sam can’t contain the little victory thrill that increases his smile.

His brother comes back downstairs to find it.

“What, bitch?”

“Nothing, jerk.”

He takes the help from Dean to get out of the chair lift and into the wheelchair. The aisles are narrow, and Dean insists on pushing Sam to an open space next to the counter.

“What do you want to read?”

Sam points at the biographical section and Dean picks one at random and brings it back over. _Savage Beauty_. He looks up at Dean, who shrugs.

“I read the summary when I was shelving it. Sounds like there’ll be a lot of sex. I have to go grab a box from the back, you settled ok?”

He nods, waits, and then when Dean is gone he wheels himself forward and tucks the photo into a nonfiction novel about the social impact of train stations. It might be a little on the nose, but if he used one of the books Campbell gave him Dean would pick up on it too quickly.

It’s a close thing, but Sam’s been working on this for a few days now and that lets him make it back to his spot before Dean gets back. He opens the Edna St. Vincent Millay book and starts reading. Dean’s not wrong, it is interesting, but Sam’s brain is everywhere at the same time.

Because if this doesn’t work.

Sam watches out of the corner of his eye as Dean sorts and shelves the books. He watches Dean put the new ones up, replace them with the old ones, and then redo the whole thing. Every now and then Dean says something to him, casual conversation, nothing that would be memorable enough for Sam to bring it up later if he was so inclined.

And he is not.

Instead he simply waits, chatting back and trying to fight the increasing panic as he watches his brother sleepwalk through his day.

Dean is gone. Sam knew that, logically, but it’s fucking hard to see. His brother has barely been able to keep himself out of any fight that came his way, and now he’s here shelving and re-shelving books like a mindless drone.

It’s heartbreaking.

When the day is over Dean turns the sign to closed, a huge grin on his face, and Sam is surprised to realize he never considered the difference between Dean happy and Dean brainwashed.

As far as he can tell the thing can influence his behavior, and his patterns of thought, but this big, stupid smile is all Dean. It’s the look he gives when he’s pulled off a particularly good prank, when he gets a triple decker cheeseburger, the first time Sam said “I love you” while they were naked together.

Despite all the taunts and the complaints here it is, plain and simple. Dean is fucking _happy_ here. Dean is happy to run a bookshop, to look over at Sam in it with him, to be here. And maybe that will all go away when Sam kills whatever runs this town, but he’s not so sure anymore.

It takes a lot of the smug out of him, and he finds himself quiet as Dean wheels him to the lift and helps him in. Quiet as Dean cooks and Sam stretches his injured muscles. Quiet while he eats what Dean made and wonders what winning will really mean.

They’ve been together in the bookshop for a week when Dean finds the photo. It’s in a book about train stations, one he’s moving out of stock and replacing with something a little more interesting. Even before the picture falls out Dean thinks that it’s something Campbell must’ve bought for himself, but the picture seals the deal.

The picture changes things.

It’s Campbell and Hal, standing at attention, in uniforms. Dean knows the look, knows the pose, knows exactly when and how this photo was taken. Dad always had a soft spot for this photo. When a civilian had it in their house his tone would get a little warmer, a little kinder.

Sam is at physical therapy, and Dean can’t get wrapped up and miss picking him up, but he finds himself staring at the image for a long time before he starts pulling out other books to cross-reference. There’s more than enough research material here to work with.

After half an hour Dean has learned three important things. Campbell was in a historical Army division with his brother, one that was famous for being involved in and winning major battles in both World Wars. Two, that Campbell and his brother had been very lucky to both come back home alive and whole considering the number of casualties the 78th division incurred.

Three, Campbell and Hal aren’t wearing a shoulder patch. Which means they joined the Lightning Division before 1922 when the insignia was commissioned. And Campbell looks like he’s out of his twenties in the photo.

_How could he have been so old?_

It’s impossible. Utterly impossible. Campbell couldn’t have still been alive, let alone mobile. And yet, Dean met him. Dean met him, worked with him, befriended him. Now he lives in Campbell’s home, owns his shop, and he’s not entirely sure who left it all to him. Or _what_.

Dean looks up to see that he’s ten minutes late to go get Sam. He flips the sign to closed and runs to the Impala hoping against hope that the fragile truce they’ve found after Sam learned that Dean was drugging him hasn’t been destroyed already. Sam is sitting outside the hospital, with his face tilted up towards the sun.

His brother doesn’t hassle him at all. Instead Sam leans extra heavy on him, obviously exhausted from his stint with Jack. He smells bad, still slightly wet with sweat, and collapses into the passenger seat when Dean lets him go.

He waits until he’s in the driver’s seat to ask.

“You ok, Sammy? You look beaten up.”

Sam nods. Wipes his face with his shirt showing off unbroken skin leading up to the gauze covering his chest. Dean finds himself fascinated by the visual.

“Yeah. Long session.”

Dean wants to ask, but he’s not sure he should. If Sam wanted to share he would have by now. That’s the only reason, it has nothing to do with the next thing out of his mouth.

“So, when are you finishing that timeline project? With the pictures?”

Sam smiles, bright and wide, rolling his head from side to side and stretching out his good leg.

“I dunno. I got really wrapped up in some of the books. I think I’ll pick it back up in a couple months.”

That takes a minute to sink in.

“What do you mean a couple months?”

“I’ve got time. I just want to finish up the books Campbell picked for me. It was just a hobby anyway.”

He cannot possibly explain to Sam why this bothers him. Sam’s mental state has been fragile enough, and Dean is worried that whatever he’s stumbled onto is going to send Sam back into a paranoid frenzy. His brother has been sleeping peacefully, taking his meds, and following all the rules of his recovery.

Telling Sam he suspects that Campbell was over 120 years old will only ruin all of that progress. He does it to protect his brother. Just one more lie on a mountain of them.

“Huh. Ok. What do you want for dinner?”

Sam’s smile stays bright, and he hooks his arm over the driver’s seat and behind Dean’s head.

“Chicken salad?”

“Hell yeah.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.” -Dario Argento

Dean has to half carry him up the stairs. Sam knows that he smells fucking terrible, he worked up a lot of extra sweat after his physical therapy session sneaking in extra exercise. He also knows that he’s about five minutes away from passing out and looks like hell. He’s basically a helpless baby right now, but despite all that he’s overjoyed.

Because he can tell from the look on Dean’s face that his brother has found the picture. Which means Dean is now on a case, hiding it from Sam, and going to be distracted. Exactly what Sam needs to start searching.

“You want a shower?”

Sam nods, not even sure how he’ll pull that off, until Dean starts shucking off his own clothes while helping Sam to the bathroom.

“Are you taking one too?”

Dean grins, face bright and sure. He is selling this to Sam as hard as he possibly can.

“Yeah, man. I’m soaked in your stink. Gotta do something about it.”

He doesn’t argue. He lets Dean take him all the way to the bathroom, and then sit him down on the toilet before acquiescing to Dean stripping off his clothes. His brother is careful, practically delicate, especially around the wound sites.

Sam is pretty sure he knows what his next steps are. He’s got tons of research stored up about all sorts of things that the well could be, but to narrow it down Sam is going to need to be able to poke around the hospital. And to do that he needs Dean to stop being so on schedule for picking him up. Dean will never agree to Sam going alone.

“Yo. Earth to Sammy.”

_Good luck, Captain Black_.

A shiver wracks him, and Dean turns the shower a little hotter and then takes Sam’s hands and rubs them.

“You ok? You checked out there.”

Sam nods, and then watches as Dean turns around and heads out the bathroom door to get extra towels. He’s not ashamed that he stares at Dean’s ass as his brother heads out of the room. It’s a good ass. Sam hasn’t had the chance to really enjoy it in a long time.

Dean comes back with the towels, and then hooks his arms under Sam’s and lifts him up. They’re pressed together, naked, and Sam feels himself taking interest more than he probably should. Dean is not in his right mind. This can’t get out of hand.

The shower is easier to check out on. Dean doesn’t try to keep up a conversation, hands busy keeping Sam stable as Sam scrubs first himself and then Dean.

When they were teenagers.

When _Sam_ was a teenager and Dean was a young adult, this used to be so much different. Showers seemed like the easiest place to hook up, no potential evidence left behind and little chance of Dad casually walking in. They’d take turns with who ended up pressed against the wall and who faced the spray, often fighting more for the hot water than the dominant sexual position.

It occurs to Sam that even that was controlled by sibling rivalry. He laughs, and Dean lifts an eyebrow before hissing when shampoo gets in his eye.

“What’s so fucking funny?”

“I was just thinking about when we- about before. When we used to shower.”

Dean’s smile turns loopy, fond, soft in a way that Dean doesn’t usually allow. He asks himself again what winning will cost his brother.

_Not that losing is a lot better_.

“I’ve been thinking about that time a lot too. Especially now that we don’t have to worry so much.”

Sam feels his eyes cut to the left, briefly avoiding the guilt that swells up at that, and then turns his gaze back to Dean. As bad as he feels about that, he’s going to feel much worse exploiting this affection that Dean is so comfortable feeling.

“Do you think Hal and Campbell felt the same way?”

His brother lets that sink in for a second, licking the water sluicing down his face off his lips, and then pulls Sam in a little closer.

“Sammy, you said Hal before and I asked if you saw it on a picture. I forgot to ask where you heard it. Since you said it wasn’t there.”

_Careful, Sam. Careful._

“You said it.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. Either that or I dreamed it, and that doesn’t seem likely. Give me the soap again?”

Dean’s face is troubled, locked into a mulish fight with his urge to prove that he’s not wrong about telling Sam and his fear that Sam will figure out Dean is on a hunt. His brother’s better angels win.

“Here. But hurry up. I’m hungry and you’re dead on your feet.”

Sam presses into Dean, letting him hold all of the weight while he scrubs for show and then drops the soap on purpose and grins. Dean’s mouth curls in response.

“Don’t you dare. You slap my ass instead of holding onto something you’ll be falling on yours.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m serious, Sam. Don’t risk it.”

“I wasn’t planning anything.”

“Sam. _Seriously_.”

He nods, watches Dean bend over, and then proves that he’s got energy reserves his brother couldn’t have imagined. As Dean is snapping back up Sam sees the wound on Dean’s left arm. A long red cut along the triceps, just closed up.

“What happened to your arm?”

Dean’s bitterness is on full display as he turns off the shower and is forced to still help Sam out and onto the toilet despite his stinging ass.

“What are you- oh. I think I scraped the front desk? I dunno. I didn’t feel it until after it happened.”

Sam doesn’t see anything that looks like infection, so he lets it go. Dean probably hit it while sleepwalking and didn’t feel it until he snapped out of the trance. And bringing that up right now will ruin everything.

Dean waits for Sam to be asleep before slipping out of the bed and heading for the living room. Sam had put the sorted piles of photos onto a shelf, with the stack of unsorted ones beside it. Dean spreads them out and starts working through his little brother’s system.

It’s not hard to follow, Sam being Sam after all, and Dean has little trouble picking up where he left off. Four hours later his eyes are burning, he’s exhausted, but there are very few images left to sort. Dean’s fingers hover over the image that first set him off, and then veer back to the most modern stack.

Some of these are in color, obviously from a time when cameras were easier to get a hold of and pictures not so set up or expensive to develop. Campbell and Hal are together in the village. Campbell is happy. Hal, for the most part, is not.

Campbell’s little brother is increasingly wan, serious, his face and body language setting him further and further apart from what Dean now suspects was more than his big brother. It’s like looking into a Winchester family photo album and seeing Sam at seventeen.

For a moment, just a small one, Dean remembers that weekend. How Sam suddenly shut down on him. How his brother slipped out of their bed and then not too long after that out of Dean’s life. He never asked if Sam planned it out that way. If Sam took what was offered to him to kill time until he was free to make better decisions.

The answer scared him too much.

But here all of Sam’s spoken excuses are gone. Everything about them being found out, about Dad killing them, about Bobby killing them, about being shunned or killed by their own colleagues is irrelevant in a tiny village nobody they know will ever visit. And Dean doesn’t have to remember the last time he was buried in Sam, sure that the two of them were started on a road together that would be forever, with just a distant bitterness. It can be present tense joy here.

He picks up a modern photo of Hal smiling, a rare one, Campbell’s arm hooked around his shoulders and their hips pressed close together. How had anyone missed the overly close nature of their relationship?

Dean immediately thinks of Dad.

At some point, sorting the modern pictures and trying to lock down the year they start versus the year they stop, Dean falls asleep. One second he’s sorting and the next he’s looking up at a noise. He walks to the window and sees Ash out in the street. Since it’s a dream, and there’s nothing to fear, Dean heads downstairs and out the front door.

Marshall Hall is strolling down main street, calm as you please, completely unconcerned that he’s been dead since Dean was saved with his life.

There’s not a sound in town, no cars or electronics, no music pouring out of the tavern or people talking outside, not even wind in the trees. Just Dean’s feet hitting the pavement and Dean’s breath puffing out of him as he follows Marshall along.

Main Street dead ends at the hospital, but they’re headed in the opposite direction. Dean comes around a curve in the street, past all the houses now and headed into the woods. He stops when Marshall stops, and watches as his inadvertent sacrifice lifts one hand and points to the town limits.

Dean freezes in place, unsure what it is that Marshall wants, and then finally breaks to move forward and grab the dead man. Leaves ripple in his hand, and Marshall tilts his head and grins carelessly before Dean wakes up.

He’s holding a tree branch in the street outside the shop.

It’s a brisk walk back into the bookstore, and he takes the time to shuck his shoes off and wash his face before climbing into bed with Sam as quietly as possible and getting fully settled back into the bed.

_What the fuck is going on_?

When did Dean start sleepwalking? Is this related to Campbell? Or to Sam? Vaguely he remembers having some kind of nightmare when they first got here, something about their mom out on the grounds of the hospital and something moving under the bed, but nothing has come since then.

He’s not Sam. He’s never had dreams that mattered.

Dean fucks up his plan by coming to physical therapy the next day. It’s hard to smile when he just wants to tell Dean to get out. Every not pointed statement he’s tried has been ignored, and if he pushes any harder Dean is going to figure out something is wrong.

So instead of digging his way through the hospital Sam is forced to listen to Dean nag him every step of his walk along the poles. He tries hard to keep his patience, but when Dean tells Sam for the fifteenth time to keep his hands on the stability of the rail, Sam snaps.

“Dude, shut up.”

Jack shifts uncomfortably, looking between the two of them.

“I’m just trying to keep you from hurting yourself more.”

“ _Myself_? Hurting _myself_? Because I did this, right? I put fucking rebar poles through me on purpose just to spite you.”

“Yeah, you _kinda did_!”

Jack gets up hastily, grabbing the belt that Sam’s forced to wear when he does this and leading Sam the last three steps. His anger ratchets up to a fifteen, and he shoves Jack away from him without thinking about the consequences.

His physical therapist hits the floor, eyes wide and mouth open, and Sam has a moment to consider how ridiculous he looks there with his scrubs pushed up exposing a smooth stomach minus one raised thin scar and a Snoopy undershirt.

Dean looks ashamed, which makes Sam both angrier and embarrassed all at once, but he doesn’t offer to help Jack up. Instead he loops his arms around Sam’s waist, and Sam realizes that the sudden violent movement has sent him backwards into the left rail. His brother lifts his shirt and makes a disappointed noise at the line of bruises already appearing on Sam’s washed out skin.

“Goddam it, Sammy.”

At this point Sam just wants to sink into the floor and not come back out again.

“Let me go. I can sit down.”

“Just shut up. Jack, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

As Dean leads Sam back over to the recovery bed to lay him down Jack makes Sam hate him even more.

“Really, don’t worry about it. It happens all the time. He’s in pain, and stressed, and-“

“ _In the fucking room_.”

Dean shoots him a look even as he smooths Sam’s shirt down.

“Thank you, Jack.”

“Let me go get you an ice pack for his side.” Jacks looks completely unruffled at this point. If Sam was at forty-five percent, he’s pretty sure he could ruffle Jack pretty fucking hard. But he’s way below that, and he can’t handle how Dean is looking at him.

His physical therapist disappears and he is left alone with his brother.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Sam ignores Dean, focusing on stretching the muscles he’s been abusing this session.

“Sam. Sam, fucking look at me. SAM!”

He keeps ignoring. He can do that. He can do a lot of things. He may be stuck in this town with a brainwashed brother and a bunch of similarly brainwashed villagers, but he’ll be damned if he _has_ to look at Dean and swallow a lecture for pushing one of the people that is _eating him_.

Whether he will ever be able to tell Dean any of this or not is entirely up to Sam being able to get Dean to _fuck off_ while Sam is here at ground zero investigating. He gave Dean a goddamn hunt and then he wakes up this morning groggy and unfocused from the fucking drugs and Dean is being a clingy asshole.

And then Dean gives him a light slap to the back of the head. It’s really nothing. Later Sam will recognize that it’s nothing, that in their long history together it may as well be a harsh look.

But in that moment, full up on pain and failure, Sam sees blood red. His chest burns and his leg aches and he _itches_ suddenly and violently, the sensation throbbing along with the pulsing of his blood.

So, Sam throws a punch. Ignores the pain and the alarms going off in the back of his head and just lets go. His knuckles connect with Dean’s chin, and he can hear the clack of Dean’s teeth slamming together before his brother goes staggering out into the middle of the room.

It hurts. It hurts worse than getting hit back. And the look of betrayed shock on Dean’s face burns along with the itching under Sam’s skin.

He pushes up, stagger stepping forward, and when Dean comes in close to make sure he doesn’t fall Sam twists his screaming upper body to connect his elbow with Dean’s face. His brother grabs his biceps, Sam already off balance, and drives his own arm into his face. When it throws Sam backwards his brother catches him around the waist almost gently before taking Sam’s thumb and bending it back to gain submission.

“Stop. Stop before they split us up and you’re alone.”

Distantly Sam recognizes that the itch has stopped, the bloodlust is gone, and he’s left feeling guilty and hollow.

And then logic takes over. Dean is right. They will split them up. They will keep Sam in the hospital for observation.

“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU, HAL!”

Jack comes running in with Jorgenson, their faces full of panic, an orderly Sam distantly remembers behind them. He can hear Dean pleading with them that Sam is just hurt and confused, that it’s not a big deal, but he’s being driven to the floor and held there none too gently by the orderly.

Dean roars, the sound familiar, comforting, and probably terrifying for the guy who has his knee in Sam’s back. And then Jorgenson is injecting Sam, something warm and soft, and Sam has time to see that under the long sleeves of Jorgenson’s traditional doctor’s coat the man once tried to commit suicide. The raised line goes the wrong way across his wrist.

The last thing he says before the blackness takes him down is, “I wish you’d gone down the road.”

He hopes Jorgenson understands.

When Sam wakes up he’s in the same hospital room he started in. Everything hurts, and his head is cloudy and thick. It’s like he’s gone back in time. Minus the fact that Dean isn’t here this time.

Jorgenson is sitting next to the bed, his expression more honest than whatever is about to come out of his mouth.

“They want me to keep you restrained and sedated.”

“Who’s they?”

Jorgenson smiles, thin and fake, before sliding just a bit closer to the bed.

“You understand how paranoid that sounds right?”

Sam swallows down his responses. His mouth is full of a chalky taste that he doesn’t want to consider too much, and if he wants to stay awake he needs to play this right.

“Yeah. I do. Where’s Dean?”

“Your boyfriend went home. You’re on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold. I’m worried that you’re a danger to yourself. I _know_ you’re a danger to others already. You hurt Dean. A lot. Do you remember doing that?”

He’s hurt Dean worse. He hangs his head and takes a deep breath.

“I. I think so.”

Jorgenson’s voice goes soft, sweet.

“Sam? Have you been having a lot of confusion lately?”

He nods, sniffles once, and then looks up to lock eyes with Jorgenson. He knows he’s an ugly crier. It’s effective.

“Is Dean ok? Can you please tell me if he’s ok?”

“Yeah, he’ll be ok. He was way more worried about you.” The doctor stands and make notations on Sam’s chart. “I want to change your medication. I think the Trazodone is part of the problem. Dean let me know you haven’t had a panic attack in a long time, so what I’d like to do is put you on something more traditional to help you sleep. Let’s see if that helps with the confusion and the outbursts. In the meantime, I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay here. As soon as the hold is over I’m sure Dean will be knocking down the door to get to you. Are you willing to try this plan and cooperate?”

“Anything to get back to Dean.”

_To get Dean back_.

“Well, let’s get you there ASAP. Rest up, Sam. I’m going to put in orders for the prescriptions and then make sure dinner is on its way to you.”

Sam waits for him to be gone before standing up. It’s not easy, he’s agitated a lot of things, but he makes his way over to the door and tests it.

It’s not locked.

_I’ll fucking kill you, Hal!_

Dean is drinking. Dean is drinking away the memory of Sam screaming that nonsense, his face screwed up red, and his eyes fixed on Dean but focused somewhere else.

How did it get so fucked up? They have a home, a place to stay, a life to build. And here they are with Dean taking his eye off the ball immediately and putting it all in danger. It took every trick he had to keep Jorgenson from putting Sam in restraints and drugging him out of his mind.

He’d treated it like a hobby, like it was no big deal at all, but now his brother was under some kind of control and Dean let it get there.

The pictures are spread out on the table in front of him, Scotch bottle on one side and a sandwich on the other. Dean has learned that the village offers nothing in the way of cheap hooch, so he is learning to deal with drinking away his guilt with his own money.

It’s not great.

He’s focused on the little details in the modern images. The electronics, the clothing, the quality of the photos. All the little bits and pieces points to the late sixties or early seventies for Campbell and Hal’s arrival and the-

None of these are their arrival. Because Campbell started in the pharmacy, not the bookshop. _Hal_ started the bookshop.

Dean starts digging, tearing the apartment apart looking for anything. He goes through every drawer, checks the walls, checks floorboards, pulls up the mattress and flips over the couch. But there’s nothing.

So, Dean goes to the shoebox of things that were given to him from Campbell’s body. He finds a key and uses that to go into the safe that he’s had no reason to enter since he took over the shop. His arm has a lingering itch where the wound Sam noticed is, spreading around like infection, but Dean takes another slug of the Scotch and it goes away. He finds inside the safe two slim black boxes and a ledger.

It’s not the shop’s ledger. Dean has been keeping that in the cash register and editing it as necessary. He puts it down on Campbell’s narrow desk and then opens one of the black boxes. He finds medals, two of each, along with name bars and regiment numbers. A newspaper clipping from a hometown paper about the two brothers coming home safely from war.

The second box has two rings in it. They are both men’s rings, thick and plain bands, and Dean is fairly certain they have never been worn. He touches them, carefully, and then on a whim pulls them out of the box and puts them both in his pocket. He’ll analyze that later.

Neither box has what he wants, so he opens the ledger to the most recent entry. It takes him a second to realize what he’s looking at. The entry on this page is Campbell’s handwriting, clear and straightforward, and it has a header in script before changing to print.

Dean scans it twice, and then flips backwards through the pages. About halfway through they become someone else’s handwriting. Dean speeds up as he goes, page to page, before he just jumps to the beginning.

And suddenly Dean knows that something is much more off than he originally thought. Because while he can’t prove it, is fairly certain he will never be able to, Dean knows for a fact that this is Hal’s handwriting.

_September 9, 1921_

_Hal and Campbell Patterson_

_Entered hospital via Hal’s broken leg._

_Replacing Patricia Johnson and Louis Farrow_

He jumps back to the most recent entry.

_Dean and Sam Winchester_

_Entered hospital via construction site accident._

_Replacing Gretta Larson and Michael O’Shea._

He closes the ledger, takes a long pull from the bottle, and then heads upstairs. What does this change? His suspicion was that Campbell was something inhuman, but now he has to wonder if he had the right guy. Is it Hal? Hal somehow manipulating people from beyond the grave? Spreading whatever paranoia he had when he entered the village beyond his death?

Does that even make sense?

It does and it doesn’t. There’re too many questions. Dean needs to find out more details about what was happening with Campbell, what happened with Hal, and only then can he figure out what exactly it is that he’s investigating here.

And he has to do it fast, because if he can’t solve whatever has its hooks in Sam soon his brother will never get out of the hospital.


	9. Chapter 9

_"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."- Oscar Wilde_

Sam is dreaming. In the dream he’s sitting across from a young Hal. There’s a chessboard in between them, and Sam is apparently playing white.

“What are we playing?”

Hal is studying the board. His leg is in a cast up to his hip, propped up on a chair. Sam has a pipe through his chest and someone has smeared black blood over the wound in his thigh.

“You know what we’re playing.”

An ankle Sam knows well passes by the door.

And he does. He moves his Rook, and Hal takes it. Sam gets momentarily distracted wiping at the blood on his thigh on his thigh. It itches and burns, whispers in his blood.

“Don’t bother. It’s already in your system. Your move.”

Sam takes his Bishop; Hal responds by taking the Knight that Sam used.

“How do I get it out?”

Sam is running out of pieces. He realizes that no matter what move he makes Hal is going to beat him.

_Zugzwang_. The trivia knowledge falls into place. Although what the real world end Sam is inevitably slamming into is he’s not exactly sure.

“The same way you always get rid of things like that. You boil it clean. You keep chasing leads but you just need to follow yourself. You need to be smart if you want a chance to save your brother. God knows I wasn’t.”

An ankle Sam knows well passes by the door.

Sam doesn’t bother making a move. The game is over.

“I’m trying. I’m actively trying.”

Hal reaches out and topples Sam’s King. He keeps Sam’s eye for a long time.

“You read the books. You got all the help you could be offered. The spirit is there even if the actual explanation is not.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

An ankle Sam knows well passes by the door.

“You’re telling you this. Make your move, Sam.”

“I lost already.”

“Make your move Sam.”

An ankle Sam knows well passes by the door.

He knocks all the pieces off the board and wakes up out of breath with a deep itch burning in his whole leg. The hospital is quiet, and Sam gets out of the bed slowly and carefully before moving across the small space in between the bed and the wheelchair.

Sam peeks out of the door and sees no one. He rolls out the door and down the hall. There are all the sounds of a hospital, but a noticeable lack of people. He keeps going, down the hall, down to the elevator. There are only three floors and a basement, but Sam is moving on instinct not logic. Chasing himself.

A memory, something that hangs in the back of his mind. An ankle that he knows well. The turn of a hip. A husky laugh as she flips a page and stretches her back. Lifts her lower half to him in offering.

Sam follows himself into the elevator. Heads for the basement.

Jess used to meditate. Not often but sometimes. She said that she could feel herself all around herself. She said that sometimes she could feel herself in Sam.

It’s a risk, he might get caught, but he needs to do it. Needs to keep moving and looking. The elevator door opens and he sees a long hallway. Poorly lit. And there at the back a dead end that he knows. It glistens in the darkness. Sam lets the elevator doors close without ever moving and then rides back to his floor.

He can’t afford to tip his hand.

Dean hands Jorgenson the stack of books. Sam is back there somewhere. Probably in the same room. And Dean is here, handing off books and being refused entry.

“I just want to hand them to him. I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is that he beat you up. Badly. In a hospital. And it took all of my influence to keep him from getting in trouble. So, please, just let him wait out the time and then he’ll be home with you.”

Dean rubs absently at his bruised jaw before finding the way to phrase it that won’t end with them being even more suspicious.

“We did bounty hunting for a long time. This is not a bad beating. And you and I both know that he didn’t do it. It was the medication and the trauma. And I was antagonizing him.”

“That was taken into account, but that doesn’t change the facts. We just wait it out, Dean. Let the meds work their way out of him, let everyone see how calm he is, and then everything will be fine.”

“Can it be reduced to forty-eight?”

“Not legally. Go home, get some rest, he’ll be back before you know it. I’ll give him the books.”

Dean nods, turns, and then stops to turn back.

“Hey, Jorgenson. Where’s the local cemetery? I wanted to go and pay my respects to Campbell.”

The doctor looks surprised, almost confused, and then he shakes his head.

“There’s no local cemetery. The village is in a flood plain. Makes for really rich earth, but not great for burials. Either way it wouldn’t matter, because Campbell was sent to his family’s plot.”

Well that’s. Unsustainable.

“Is that where his brother was sent?”

“His brother?”

“Hal. I’ve been looking at his old photos while I box things up.”

Jorgenson’s mouth curls, fondness that surprises Dean.

“Oh yeah. I met him once. Same cemetery.”

Dean gives a half wave and takes off. He drives around the village aimlessly before heading back to the shop. Sam’s laptop is sitting on the coffee table, and Dean turns it on and starts his digging. A lot of his recent research has been fueled by the books downstairs, but this one isn’t going to be found there.

He has a hometown newspaper from Vermont as a starting point, and he digs until he finds the Pattersons. The family is rich, old money, real estate, banking, etc. They seem as distantly happy as wealthy people always do. Making sure to take community photo opportunities at every turn, philanthropic, clean cut. Dean goes back, and back further, until he finds an obituary.

The Pattersons have a family plot in Vermont. He calls Bobby and gets a voicemail. Leaves a detailed message asking him to either go to Vermont or have someone check for the grave of Hal Patterson. Once he has someone there have them call Dean.

After that he starts going back through the shop. The apartment had been a bust, but the shop has been fairly fruitful. Dean starts by shaking every book in the place, looking for the possibility of another tucked photo or note. Just anything that would be of use. After he empties a shelf he tries the back wall of it to make sure that it’s solid and not hiding anything before moving to the next one.

Shelf after shelf Dean digs for something. Anything. But there is nothing hidden here by Campbell. Nothing else to give him a clue of where to go or how to get there.

In the absence of hope Dean picks the Scotch bottle back up and settles down with the Bradbury book he left out of the stack. Sam had already finished it so Dean didn’t see a reason to leave it there.

_“’Mars is Heaven’, also known as ‘The Third Expedition’. You were just about to read it.”_

He might have had the conversation a thousand years ago. They never revisited that talk.

Dean opens the book and starts flipping pages.

Sam stares at the books for a long time. It was right there in front of him the whole time.

_Goddamn it_.

Because he does remember Jess reading it. He remembers her doing a lot of things, but reading is a big one because she had a real thing for sex with a book. Sam always appreciated the kink.

He turns on the TV. He can’t remember who told him Captain Black yet, but he can remember Jess reading the story. He can remember her making fun of Rockwell, a dislike they shared, and he can remember her saying how sad it was. How easy it was to lull the protagonists into easy prey.

All you had to do was make the hunting grounds home.

The phenomena, whatever it may be, that causes dead people to visit appears to be infinitely worse when Sam is in the hospital. He probably shouldn’t be surprised.

Maybe it wants him to act irrationally so that it can further push Dean away from him. But Sam suspects that whoever gave it power in the first place did so expending a great amount of emotion. And he suspects it feeds best on that same intensity.

From people like him.

Every now and then someone slips past the door, opening it enough to try to catch his view before giving up and disappearing. There’s a sound outside the window that would lead Sam over in any other world. He ignores all of them.

Maybe it wants to wear him down. Maybe it wants him to embrace the lie like Captain Black. Mars isn’t heaven and neither is-

Sam can’t help himself. He starts giggling, and when a nurse peeks in he points to the SNL episode and she smiles before slipping back out again.

How long have they been here? How long have they been living on whatever it puts in them? Who was the first to go into the basement, see that weeping blood, and drink from the well?

_The fucking place doesn’t even have a name._

Dean is going nuts. He’s not made for puttering around, but he has no other option. There’s nowhere for him to go and nothing else for him to do. He can’t afford to leave town long enough to go to Vermont and check for himself. Bobby still hasn’t called him back, and when Dean shot off a text he got back an irrational string of words that tell a story only Bobby can understand.

Drinking doesn’t help, because it leads to crazy dreams about dead people wandering around the village leading him to nothing. Changing the stock around only makes him feel like a rat in a cage.

Somehow he ends up on the roof of the store, staring up at the stars. Dean can’t remember the last time he and Sam did this. They should come up when he gets out.

Although getting Sam up here will be a pain in the ass.

He puts one hand out against the rooftop, fingers stretched and outspread, and thinks of the road ahead. He thinks of Sam screaming, out of his mind, staring at …

What was he staring at? It wasn’t Dean. But it wasn’t in Dean’s vicinity either. Sam had been looking over Dean’s shoulder. At the door.

Dean sits up, looks around the roof, and then heads down the stairs and into the apartment. He pulls out Sam’s laptop again and starts looking through his brother’s browser history. Or tries at least, because Sam has wiped it.

Big brother sense tingling, Dean closes the laptop and calls Bobby. He gets the voicemail again.

“Bobby, listen, did you talk to Sam recently? Did he tell you to stall me? Call me back. Seriously. Immediately.”

There’s no TV in the apartment or the shop, so Dean goes back to the pile of books. He settles down with the Bradbury book he left out of the stack. Sam had already finished it so Dean didn’t see a reason to leave it there.

_“’Mars is Heaven’, also known as ‘The Third Expedition’. You were just about to read it.”_

He might have had the conversation a thousand years ago. They never revisited that talk.

Dean opens the book and starts flipping pages.

Sam is running out of time. Tomorrow they’ll be sending him back to the shop with Dean. And while he was able to buy himself a few days there is no doubt that when he steps into the shop Dean is going to have questions. Questions Sam can’t afford to answer.

The thing can’t read minds, if it did one of them would probably be dead by now, but either the people of the village report to it or whatever it leaves in people can hear what’s going on. Sam isn’t taking chances either way.

Because Dean has that cut. Because it’s in Dean, and he’s been away from Sam so there’s no telling how many times he’s drunk from the well without knowing it. Probably the only thing that’s saved Sam is that he wasn’t mobile enough to be taken there repeatedly.

It’s antiquated. The thing, or the system it engenders, or the people it won over. Sam can’t tell which and honestly he doesn’t care at all anymore. The mystery doesn’t matter. What matters is the two of them getting out of this fucking village upright and breathing.

Paper charts, no cell phones that he’s seen, and a tiny staff. Which means they probably have to monitor all their supply closets with a ledger. And they probably don’t watch them very closely because Sam is starting to believe that there may not even be other patients. Why guard an empty prison?

He briefly considers the possibility of what sort of link the pieces of it have to the whole thing, but he can’t obsess on that. He can’t sit here and question whether or not what he’s about to do will have fallout.

The only other way would be worse.

When Sam is sure that the hospital is at its most quiet, he rolls out into the hall and then heads down to the supply closet. He’s fairly certain he could make the distance with a walker, but he wouldn’t get out fast enough. The thing is neatly kept, but Sam sees dust where a real hospital would never allow it.

While Sam is loading gauze and bandages into his lap he looks up to see Dad staring at him through the door. His father looks disappointed, and Sam briefly feels two feet tall as his hand hovers over another roll.

Then he gets himself together and keeps loading his lap up. Dad’s disappointed and dead.

What the hell else is new?

As quietly as he can Sam loads the last package of gauze he can find into his lap on top of the copy of _Burnt Offerings_ that Campbell gave him along with the little piece he took from the chart.

The halls stay empty, a stroke of luck Sam can’t even begin to handle, and he rolls past Jess whispering his name, past Dad giving him an awkward smile, and past Madison crying into his mother’s shoulder. He keeps going, down the elevator, down into the basement, ignoring each memory as it tries to lure him into the loop of sleepwalking he’s been watching for so long.

He finds the generator room easily. Finds the containers he needs and some rope and attaches them to his wheelchair as best he can. It requires him to get up, but it’s worth it to bring as much as possible. He has to be sure.

Sam stops in front of the wall and starts assembling, moving quickly out of experience and need. He wonders what will happen if he’s wrong. He wonders if Dean will die.

Luckily, the one thing Sam can be sure of is that if he’s wrong he won’t outlive Dean to regret it.

He pours the gas out onto the floor, soaks the gauze and rolls backwards away from the weeping wall making himself two long wicks. It whispers to him, causing his blood to burn, causing his head to ache and his stomach to twist and pull. Sam stops long enough to throw up his last meal before continuing back to the elevator.

And then he tucks the paperclip into the book. Takes a deep breath and centers himself, focuses on the path out through the elevator. The one that Dean rode down so long ago. Baby won’t be waiting in the parking lot, but that’s ok. Sam has a feeling she’ll be on her way.

This will be hard to miss.

He hopes that the damn elevator will run fast enough up one floor to get him out safely because he can’t afford the stairs. Just in case he hits the button and watches the door open.

Sam loads the paperclip into the pages of _Burnt Offerings_ and then jams it into the wall socket. There’s a power surge, and the pages light up and start to burn merrily while the lights flicker and then restore themselves. Then he slides the book across the gauze and watches the wicks light.

He counts. He counts as Jess rushes up the hall with her hands out. As Madison pleads for him to bring her the promised cure. As dad looks at him with ultimate disapproval.

And then, when the fire is traveling, when the wicks have certainly lit he rolls himself into the elevator ignoring his protesting muscles as the fire bursts outwards behind him and something screams all around him.

Sam is speeding, rushing towards the exit when an arm slams into his chest and his vision briefly blacks out. Jorgenson gets right into his face, breath heavy and gross, expression twisted in hatred and horror.

“What the fuck did you do?”

He manages to push off just in time for the scalpel to kiss his shoulder instead of his neck, no pain at all just wet immediately after.

“Fuck you.”

Jorgenson lunges and Sam rolls backwards and slams into the wall. It would be sad if it wasn’t so scary. The alarms are going off, the hospital is burning down around them, and Sam has a brother to catch.

“YOU KILLED ALL OF US!”

He lunges again, and this time Sam is ready. He twists his upper body despite the pain and tips the wheelchair so it goes crashing to the ground. Jorgenson goes past him, hand slapping into the wall, and Sam grabs his ankle and pulls hard. The doctor hits the floor and Sam rolls on top of him and uses both hands to grasp the wrist attached to the scalpel hand. He slams it down and Jorgenson lets go of the scalpel in an attempt to keep it from stabbing him in the chest.

Sam is faster, trained, more desperate. He gets the thing before Jorgenson can even really try, and then uses it to slice the doctor’s wrist deep and long. He’s watched the man write, his right hand is dominant and now it’s crippled.

“No. Not all. Just the ones I don’t give a fuck about.”

He slices the other one out of spite, it’s not like it makes much difference, and then rolls back to the chair. Jorgenson is desperately trying to stop the bleeding as Sam rights the goddamn thing and gets himself back into it.

“Sam. _Sam_.”

He puts the brakes on and uses it to get himself up before sitting and continuing his exit.

“Call me Captain Black.”

The dead don’t follow him out of the hospital, and Sam doesn’t turn around to look. There’s a numbness in his leg that suggests what he was hoping was true, but that doesn’t change the fact he’ll need to be thorough later on. Keep an eye on what he’s seeing and feeling.

Maybe get a blood test.

A mile of rolling down Main Street, Dean meets him in the car.


	10. Chapter 10

“My land is bare of chattering folk;  
The clouds are low along the ridges,  
And sweet's the air with curly smoke  
From all my burning bridges.”

-Dorothy Parker, “Sanctuary”

They stay for three weeks. Every morning Dean slips out of the apartment silently and heads to the hospital. He makes sure to sow salt into the earth and consecrate the ground. Afterwards he spends two hours searching sections of the woods.

There is no telling which villagers weren’t here long enough to crumble like Campbell when the well was destroyed. It’s best to be sure.

On day three he finds Jack, holed up in a part of the woods, looking like run over shit and crouched under a makeshift tent. The physical therapist snarls, and Dean shoots him. It’s a little simplistic, but Dean doesn’t have time to fuck around with the guy. He has to get back to Sam.

After finding a map of the village in the sheriff’s office Dean marked out search areas in the woods. There are only five to go before he has covered all the ground that seems like potential hiding spots.

Sam has a rough theory of what happened. The village is old. In the town hall his brother locates records of the buildings, but not the people. He explains to Dean the spread of popularity embalming experienced after the Civil War. He tells Dean about when sewers became common in major cities, but didn’t quite make it to the outskirts of civilization.

They drained the fluids back then, but without sewers to drain them into the blood had to be stored and dumped. And people, Sam points out, have been lazy for a long time. If it sat, if it collected, if one person a little too strong in whatever Sam has a touch of infected it with themselves. Sam shrugged at that point in the explanation before turning back to his sandwich. His hands shook as he lifted it, and Dean couldn’t make himself ask more.

His brother calls it a well. Dean puts the pieces together. Something viscous and hungry, feeding and growing itself on people like Sam and sustaining people like Dean to trap them there. Growing until it leaked through the walls and into the very ground of the village. 

When he gets back to the apartment every day he takes a shower and then goes through the motions of physical therapy with Sam. His brother is taking unaided steps, but he can’t go very far. The extra layers of injury that he picked up the night he burned the hospital down don’t help. Dean can see how bad it hurts Sam to move, but he’s not willing to suggest Sam take anything stronger than a Tylenol.

He has, at least, learned _that_ lesson.

They don’t talk. Not about what Dean did, or what he believed, or what Sam experienced while Dean was living in his fugue. Talking, Dean knows, will come eventually. But they focus on getting Sam better and making sure that there are no infected survivors left to try for revenge. There is no way to tell what someone exposed for longer could do with their blood.

Dean eats his guilt every time Sam smiles at him when he takes an extra step or crosses off another section of the map. He eats it when he comes back to find Sam tracking out every name written in Campbell and Hal’s ledger. He has a mighty helping when Sam asks about Dean coming to bed.

He’s not sure why Sam asks for that. He comes up with a reason not to.

Sam doesn’t ask again.

He keeps going, marking off the map and helping Sam. Stopping every now and then for supplies from the grocer. Wondering when the power will be cut off, when the village will just stop running, when they won’t be able to hole up here anymore.

When he won’t have any more time to consecrate the earth and make sure that his mistakes can’t come back to haunt them.

Sam manages to talk him through what equipment to harvest from the Sheriff’s office so that he can look at their blood. They’re pretty sure there’s nothing left after the source was destroyed, but Dean wonders about himself. His brother doesn’t have to point out that the blood inside of him didn’t turn him into a traitor. Sure, Dean could respond if he did that he might have had more, and whatever was special about Sam that gave the well its meal isn’t special about Dean.

But he could also point out that there’s really nothing special about Dean.

Dean comes home one day to find Sam collapsed on the floor. His heartrate spikes, and he wonders absently if this is the day he learns just how bad his fuckups can compound on one another. He hits the floor beside Sam even as he’s still considering it.

“Sammy? Hey, Sammy?”

His brother’s eyes open, mouth curving into a huge smile.

“From the bathroom to here. No cane, no wall support.”

Dean’s forehead slaps into Sam’s, and his stupid little brother makes a sharp noise.

“You asshole.”

“I’m proud of you too, Dean.”

Something snaps inside him, and he carefully loops his arms around Sam’s back and then lifts him up. His brother doesn’t fight, just links his arms around Dean’s shoulders and takes the ride. They end up in the bathroom, and Sam settles onto the toilet and turns on the shower while Dean gets them both undressed.

“I liked it.”

Sam doesn’t say anything. Watches him hang himself with his own mouth.

“A lot. I liked being your boyfriend. I liked having a place to sleep and a bed we shared. I liked knowing where we were gonna be every night.”

His brother is naked, stiches, cuts, burns all on display. A roadmap of all the ouchies Dean let happen in the interest of being Sam’s boyfriend instead of his brother.

It turns him on at the same time it makes him feel sick.

“So, I fucked up. Like. Just so bad, Sam. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let it get to me, I’m sorry I made you vulnerable, and I’m sorry I was so fucking stupid.”

His brother is pressed against the tile wall, the space small and the spray barely hitting him around Dean’s body.

“But I’m not sorry we were together.”

Sam’s eyes light up, his mouth twisting with delight and not a single word coming out of it.

Dean will take it. He moves up close, pressing against Sam, and then finds himself moving backwards with Sam’s hand.

“Wash first. You smell like a grave.”

“You think you smell better?”

Sam rolls his eyes, and then points at the soap. Dean hands it over and then stands still while Sam scrubs him down.

“You know, not all of it is your fault. If that makes you feel any better.”

It’s Dean’s turn to be silent and let Sam talk. He soaks in the feeling of Sam’s slick hands rubbing his lower back, and then down over his ass.

“And you don’t need an apartment for us to be boyfriends. Or for us to know where we end up every night. Maybe the bed thing, but the rest of it we don’t need this. We’ll end up together. Every night. We’ll end here.”

Sam presses his body close, cock rubbing against Dean’s. He reaches down and slides his fingers along Sam’s perineum. Feels his brother shiver.

“That was beautiful, Sammy. Romantic and beautiful.”

“Shut up.”

“I heard the orchestra swell it was so beautiful.”

“Dean, shut up.”

“Did you see doves? I think I saw doves.”

Sam bites his shoulder so hard Dean feels it all the way down his arm. He grips Sam’s hip and twists him, catching his brother when his footing goes unsure and almost topples him. Sam’s hands slap the wall and Dean slides his hand down Sam’s back and over the healing wound on his right side. He slides one arm around Sam to stroke his cock and the other starts stroking Sam’s hole.

His brother is a little bonier and more familiar now, angles the same as those sharp teen years. Dean feels that same illness mixed with lust. Sam can start to regain his muscle mass later on, for now Dean can enjoy this nostalgia.

They fuck around in the shower until the hot water runs out and Dean’s back can’t take the cold any longer. He kicks the faucet to shut it off and then lifts Sam out of the shower before half carrying and half dragging him back to the bedroom.

From there it’s all muscle memory. Sammy’s buttons are the same it seems, and Dean presses every last one of them. He bites, he pulls, he curses, and Sam groans, and bucks, and fights back.

A part of him screams that this is his baby brother and he should at the very least go easy on the parts of him that are ripped up. Dean does not give in to that urge.

It’s been years since Dean had a mouthful of Sam’s flesh. He bites the thigh that wasn’t impaled, and then slides his mouth over Sam’s cock and starts to suck. Fingers Sam a little roughly with spit and chokes when Sam pushes him too far down.

Should it be sweet? After this long Dean doesn’t think so.

He disengages with tears in his eyes and gives Sam the one second gesture. A quick search of the kitchen gives up a bottle of olive oil that smells just fine, and Dean takes the win. He jerks his cock with it while striding back to the bedroom.

Dean finds his brother propping his ass up in the air with pillows. He approves of Sammy’s ingenuity greatly.

“Ok, this ain’t great but it’s what we got.” He slides the oil in with his fingers, and Sam curses and pushes back hard.

“What the fuck is-“

“Don’t ask, Sammy. You ready?”

His brother looks back, hair falling into his eyes and mouth curled hungrily.

“Yeah. Ready.”

Dean wraps his arm around Sam’s clavicles, lines up, and shoves in. Sam is _just right_.

“I’m not porridge, Motor Mouth.”

He rolls his eyes and pulls Sam back with his looped arm, shoving in deeper. His brother bites his forearm hard, and Dean is too close, too fast with just that one move.

“The fuck you aren’t. Hot and wet.”

“And lumpy?” Sam asks around a mouthful of Dean’s skin.

“Shut the fuck up.”

And then he sets about reminding Sam how easy it is to make noise without it being sassy. Despite the injuries and what is probably a fair amount of pain Sam is leading it. Dean becomes so busy keeping Sam as stable and off his healing wounds with both hands that his little brother leads it by fucking himself back onto Dean’s stationary cock and down into the pillow.

He thinks briefly of machines he’s seen in pornos, and then forgets them when Sam growls his name and tightens up. It takes Dean a second to realize his brother has orgasmed, and is now laying perfectly limp against the pillows with a beatific smile on his face.

“Oh, fuck that.”

He turns them so he can loop Sam’s good leg back onto his, and then he starts to fuck his sated and limp brother in earnest. Sam puts up the most token version of participation possible, but Dean can get off on the breathy little sounds his brother can’t control. He finishes inside, teeth scraping Sam’s neck and hand stroking gently along the length of Sam’s side.

They lay there silently, breathing and sharing space, and then Dean slips out and off and goes for a washcloth and a towel. He gets them both cleaned up, checks all of Sam’s sites, and then collapses into the pillow.

Only to realize which pillow Sam put on his side. His brother’s breathless laughter follows him into the bathroom.

They stay until the food runs out. Sam can move unaided for short bursts before needing a cane. Dean finds one of Campbell’s old ones and Sam eyes it warily before accepting it.

Two hundred miles outside of the village Dean pulls the car over and parks. Together they lay out under the stars, fingers tangled together and eyes up on the stars. They share a beer since Sam forgot to fill the cooler back up.

“You know, this is still nice.”

Sam looks over at Dean, not sure what his brother means or why he’s saying it. This is not typically an activity they talk through.

“Ok.”

“No, I mean. After everything. This is still nice.”

Sam stretches, burps, and then passes the bottle back over.

“Sure.”

“Maybe we don’t need a house.”

“We still have to figure out the dreams Dean, we have to kill the bastard that killed Jess and mom.”

“I know, it’s just- “

“But after that? We could find a place. Maybe in Ohio. It’s always so full of bullshit we’d never have to go far.”

Dean laughs, teeth glinting dangerously in the dark, and then squeezes Sam’s hand tightly.

“Yeah. We could do that.”

And that’s the moment that Sam knows the game is over. No matter where he moved his pieces, across the car, across the room, across the goddamn country, it was always going to end up here.

Not death, although that was certainly still a large possibility, but with Dean. Maybe that would eventually become both, but for now it was just Dean.

_Zugzwang_.

**Author's Note:**

> This was hard. This was one of a number of stories I was working on when my brother passed away, and so much of what I put into Sam's recovery and his hospital stay came from what I witnessed when my own brother was struggling in 2005. It seemed so distant and easy to use, and then he was gone and it wasn't. I tried to come back to it, but there was no light in the tunnel to follow out.
> 
> If it wasn't for people like without_me , the original bidder, who believed and wanted this story, roadrhythm who cheerleaded and tried so hard with betaing this, clex_monkie89 spot checking live as I crawled my way out of the hole I was in, and sammichgirl who has been taking care of me since I started in this arena and has been involved in every big bang I ever tried. Thank you. Thank you all, and all the other fandom friends who have been so supportive and close. I can never tell you how grateful I am.


End file.
